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The Jonathan Papers 



By 



Elisabeth Woodbridge Tit^-v^o^ 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

(^\)t fM'otv^itz pre?? Cambribje 
1912 






COPYRIGHT, 191 2, BY ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE MORRIS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published April IQ12 



SCI.A3I.4087 



TO JONATHAN 

AND TO ALL PERFECT COMRADESHIP 

WHEREVER ITS JOYOUS SPIRIT IS FOUND 

THIS LITTLE BOOK IS DEDICATED 



Contents 

Foreword — On Taking One's Dessert 

'First ix 

[I. A Placid Runaway 3 

II. An Unprogressive Farm .... 14 

III. A Desultory Pilgrimage ... 25 

IV. The Yellow Valley 38 

V. Larkspurs and Hollyhocks . . 49 

VI. The Farm Sunday 68 

VII. The Grooming of the Farm . . 87 

VIII. "Escaped from Old Gardens" . 107 

IX. The Country Road 114 

X. The Lure of the Berry . . . 131 

XL In the Rain 139 

XII. As THE Bee Flies 155 

XIII. A Dawn Experiment .... 171 

XIV. In the Wake of the Partridge . 183 
XV. Beyond the Realm of Weather. 199 

XVI. Comfortable Books 214 

XVII. In the Firelight 222 

The papers in this volume first appeared in the Outlook, the At- 
lantic, and Scrihner's. The author wishes to express to the editors 
of these magazines her appreciation of their courtesy in permitting 
the republication of the papers. 



Foreword 

On Taking One's Dessert First 

When we were children we used to "happen 
in" to the kitchen just before luncheon to see 
what the dessert was to be. This was because 
at the luncheon table we were not allowed to 
ask, yet it was advantageous to know, for 
since even our youthful capacity had its lim- 
its, we found it necessary to "save room," 
and the question, of course, was, how much 
room? 

Discovering some favorite dish being pre- 
pared, we used to gaze with watering mouth, 
and, though knowing its futility, could seldom 
repress the plea, "May n't we have our des- 
sert now?" Of course we never did, of course 
we waited, and of course, when that same 
dessert came to us, properly served, at the 
proper time, after a properly wholesome 
luncheon preceding, it found us expectant, 
perhaps, but not eager; appreciative, but not 



X 



FOREWORD 



enthusiastic. It was not to us what it would 
have been at the golden moment when we 
begged for it. 

In hours of unbridled hostility to domestic 
conditions we used sometimes to plan for a 
future when we should be grown up, and then 
would we not change this sorry scheme of 
things entire! Would we not have a larder, 
with desserts in it, our favorite desserts — 
and would we not devour these same, boldly, 
recklessly, immediately before the meal for 
which they were intended ! Just would n't 



we 



And afterward — just did n't we ! Most 
youthful fancies are doomed to fade unreal- 
ized, but this one was too fundamentally 
practical and sane. We are grown up, we 
have a larder, with now and then toothsome 
desserts in it, and now and then we grip our 
conscience till it cowers and is still, we wait 
till the servants are out, we walk into our 
pantry — and then — 

Yes, triumphant we still believe what once 
militant we maintained — that the only way 
to eat cake is when it is just out of the oven, 
that the only way to eat ice cream is to dip 



FOREWORD xi 

it out of the freezer, down under the apple 
tree, in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon. 
Afterward, when it appears in sober decorum, 
surrounded by all the appurtenances of civ- 
ilization, it is a very commonplace affair; out 
under the apple tree it is ambrosia. 

Why not go further? Why not take all our 
desserts in life when they taste best, instead 
of at the proper time, when we don't care for 
them? Desserts are, I suppose, meant to be 
enjoyed. Why not have them when most 
enjoyable? I wonder if there is not a certain 
perverted conscientiousness that leads us to 
this enforcement of our pleasures. I am my- 
self conscious that I can scarcely ever ap- 
proach a pleasure with a mind singly bent on 
enjoyment. I regard it with something like 
suspicion, I hedge, I hesitate, I defer. What 
is the motive force here? Is it an inherited 
asceticism, bidding us beware of pleasure as 
such? Is it pride, which will not permit us to 
make unseemly haste toward our desires? Is 
it a subtle self -gratification, which seeks to 
add zest, tone, to our delights by postponing 
them? Is it fear of anticlimax, which makes 
us save our pleasure for the last thing, that 



xii FOREWORD 

there may be no descent afterward? Cer- 
tainly the last was the motive in the case of 
the little boy who, dining out, was given a 
piece of mince and one of custard pie. He 
liked the mince best, therefore he saved it 
until the last, and had just conscientiously 
finished the custard when his beaming hostess 
said: "Oh, you like the custard best! Well, 
dear, you need n't eat the other. Delia, bring 
another plate for Henry and I'll give him 
another piece of the custard pie." Pathetic! 
Yet I confess my sympathy with Henry has 
always been qualified by disapproval of his 
methods, which, it seems to me, brought 
down upon him an awful but not wholly 
undeserved penalty. 

The incident is worth careful attention. 
For life, I believe, is continually treating us 
as that benevolent but misguided hostess 
treated the incomprehensible Henry. If we 
postpone our mince pie, it is often snatched 
from us and we never get it at all. I knew a 
youth once who habitually rode a bicycle that 
was too small for him. He explained that he 
continued to do this because then, when at 
same future time he did have one that fitted 



FOREWORD xiii 

him, he would be so surpassingly comfortable ! 
Soon after, bicycles went out of fashion, and 
I fear the moment of supreme luxury never 
came. His mince pie had, as it were, been 
snatched from him. One of my friends wrote 
me once: "It seems to me I am always dis- 
tractingly busy just getting ready to live, but 
I never really begin." Most of us are in the 
same plight. We are like the thrifty house- 
wife who kept pushing the week's work earlier 
and earlier, until it backed up into the week 
before; yet with all her planning she never 
succeeded in clearing one little spot of leisure 
for herself. She never got her dessert at all. 
Probably she would not have enjoyed it if she 
had had it. For the capacity to enjoy desserts 
in life is something not to be trifled with. 
Children have it, and grown people can keep 
it if, they try, but they don't always try. I 
knew of a man who worked every minute un- 
til he was sixty, getting rich. He did get rich. 
Then he retired; he built him a "stately 
pleasure palace," and set about taking his 
pleasure. And lo ! he found that he had for- 
gotten how! He tried this and that, indoor 
and outdoor pleasures, the social and the sol- 



xiv FOREWORD 

itary, the artistic and the semi-scientific — all 
to no purpose. Here were all the desserts that 
throughout his life he had been steadfastly 
pushing aside; they were ranged before him 
to partake of, and when he would partake he 
could not. And so he left his pleasure palace 
and went back to "business." 

We are not all so far gone as this, but few 
of us have the courage to take our desserts 
when they are oflFered, or the free spirit to 
enjoy them to the uttermost. I get up on a 
glorious summer morning and gaze out at the 
new day. With all the strongest and deepest 
instincts of my nature I long to go out into 
the green beauty of the world, to fling myself 
down in some sloping meadow and feel the 
sunshine envelop me and the warm winds pass 
over me, to see them tossing the grasses and 
tugging at the trees and driving the white 
clouds across the blue, and to feel the great 
earth revolving under me — for if you lie long 
enough you can really get the sense of sailing 
through space. All this I long for — from my 
window. Then I turn back to my unglorified 
little house — little, however big, compared 
with the limitless world of beauty outside — 



FOREWORD XV 

and betake myself to my day's routine occu- 
pations. I read my mail, I answer letters, I 
go over accounts, I fly to the telephone and 
give orders and make engagements. And 
at length, after hours of such stultifying em- 
ployment, I elect to call myself "free," and 
go forth to enjoy my "well-earned" leisure. 
Fool that I am ! As if enjoyment were a thing 
to be taken up and laid down at will, like a 
walking-stick. As if one could let the golden 
moment pass and hope to find it again await- 
ing our convenience. Why can we not be like 
Pippa with her one precious day? But if she 
had been born in New England do you sup- 
pose her day would have been what it was? 
Would she have sprung up at daybreak with 
heart and mind all alight for pleasure? Cer- 
tainly not. She would have spent the golden 
morning in cleaning the kitchen, and the 
golden afternoon in clearing up the attic, and 
would have gone out for a little walk after the 
supper dishes were washed, only because she 
thought she "ought" to take a little exercise 
in the open air. 

Duty and work are all very well, but we 
have bound ourselves up in them so com- 



xvi FOREWORD 

pletely that we have almost lost the art of 
spontaneous enjoyment. We can feel com- 
fortable or uncomfortable, annoyed or grati- 
fied, but we cannot feel simple, buoyant, in- 
stinctive enjoyment in anything. We take 
our very pleasures under the name of duties — 
"We ought to take a walk," *'We ought not 
to miss that concert," "We ought to read" 
a certain book, "We ought" to go and see this 
friend, or invite that one to see us. Those 
things that should be our spontaneous pleas- 
ures we have clothed and masked until they 
no longer know themselves. A pleasure must 
present itself under the guise of a duty before 
we feel that we can wholly give ourselves over 
to it. 

Ah, let us stop all that! Let us take our 
pleasures without apology. Let us give up 
this fashion of shoving them away into the 
left-over corners of our lives, covering their 
gleaming raiment with sad-colored robes, and 
visiting them with half -averted faces. Let 
us consort with them openly, gayly ! 



The Jonathan Papers 



The Jonathan Papers 



A Placid Runaway 

Jonathan and I differ about a great many- 
things; how otherwise are we to avoid the 
sloughs of bigoted self-satisfaction? But upon 
one point we agree: we are both convinced 
that on a beautiful morning in April or May- 
or June there is just one thing that any right- 
minded person really wants to do. That is to 
turn a deaf ear to duty and a blind eye to all 
other pleasures, and — find a trout brook. 
We are, indeed, able to understand that duty 
may be too much for him — may be quite 
indifferent to his deaf ear and shout in the 
other, or may even seize him by the shoulders 
and hold him firmly in his place. He may not 
be able so much as to drop a line in the brown 
water all through the maddening spring days. 
But that he should not want to — ache to — 
this we cannot understand. We do know that 



4 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

it is not a thing to be argued about. It is 
temperamental, it is in the blood, or it is not. 
Jonathan and I always want to. 

Once it was almost the end of April, and 
we had been wanting to ever since March 
had gone out like a lion — for in some parts 
of New England a jocose legislature has 
arranged that the trout season shall begin 
on April Fool's Day. Those who try to 
catch trout on April first understand the 
joke. 

"Jonathan," I said over our coffee, '*have 
you noticed the weather to-day?" 

" Um-m-pleasant day," he murmured ab- 
stractedly from behind his newspaper. 

"Pleasant! Have you felt the sunshine? 
Have you smelt the spring mud.^^ I want to 
roll in it!" 

Jonathan really looked up over his paper. 
"Do!" he said, benevolently. 

"Jonathan, let's run away!" 

"Can't. There's a man coming at — " 

"I know. There's always a man coming. 
Tell him to come to-morrow. Tell him you 
are called out of town." 

"But you have a lot of things to-day too 



A PLACID RUNAWAY 5 

— book clubs and Japanese clubs and such 
things. You said last night — " 

" I '11 tell them I 'm called out of town too. 
I am called — we 're both called, you know 
we are. And we've got to go." 

"Really, my dear, you know I want to, 
but—" 

"No use! It's a runaway. Get the time- 
table and see which is the first train to any- 
where — to nowhere — who cares where!" 

Jonathan went, protesting. I let him pro- 
test. A man should have some privileges. 

We took the first train. It was a local, of 
course, and it trundled jerkily along one of 
the little rivers we knew. When the conduc- 
tor came to us, Jonathan showed him our 
mileage book. "Where to?" he asked me- 
chanically, but stiffened to attention when 
Jonathan said placidly, "I don't know yet. 
Where are we going, my dear.'^" 

" I had n't thought," I said; "let's see the 
places on the map." 

"Well, conductor," said Jonathan, "take 
off for three stations, and if we don't get off 
then, you'll find us here when you come 
around, and then you can take off some more." 



6 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

The conductor looked us both over. We 
were evidently not a bridal couple, and we 
did n't look quite like criminals — he gave us 
up. 

When we saw a bit of country that looked 
attractive, we got off. That was something I 
had always wanted to do. All my life I have 
had to go to definite places, and my memory 
is full of tantalizing glimpses of the charming 
spots I have passed on the road and could 
never stop to explore. This time we really did 
it. We left the little railway station, sitting 
plain and useful beside the track, went up the 
road past a few farmhouses, over a fence and 
across a soft ploughed field, and down to the 
little river, willow-bordered, shallow, golden- 
brown, with here and there a deep pool under 
an overhanging hemlock or a shelving, fretted, 
bush-tangled bank. 

We sat down in the sun on a willow log 
and put our rods together. Does anj^thing 
sound prettier than the whir and click of the 
reel as one pulls out the line for the first time 
on an April day.^ We sat and looked at the 
world for a little, and let the wind, with just 
the faint chill of the vanishing snows still in 



A PLACID RUNAWAY 7 

it, blow over us, and the sun, that was making 
anemones and arbutus every minute, warm 
us through. It was almost too good to begin, 
this day that we had stolen. I felt like a 
child with a toothsome cake — "I'll put it 
away for a while and have it later." 

But, after all, it was already begun. We 
had not stolen it, it had stolen us, and it held 
us in its power. Soon we wandered on, at 
first hastening for the mere joy of motion and 
the freshness of things; then, as the wind 
lessened and the sun shone hot in the hollows, 
loitering more and more, dropping a line here 
and there where a deep pool looked suggest- 
ive. Trout? Yes, we caught some. Jonathan 
pulled in a good many; I got enough to seem 
industrious. I seldom catch as many as Jona- 
than, though he tries to give me all the best 
holes ; because really there are so many other 
things to attend to. Men seem to go fishing 
chiefly to catch fish. Jonathan spends half 
an hour working his rod and line through a 
network of bushes, briers, and vines, to drop 
it in a chosen spot in a pool. He swears gently 
as he works, but he works on, and usually 
gets his fish. I don't swear, so I know I could 



8 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

never carry through such an undertaking, 
and I don't try. 

I did try once, when I was young and reck- 
less. I headed the tip of my rod, like a lance 
in rest, for the most open spot I could see. 
For the fisherman's rule in the woods is not 
"Follow the flag," but "Follow your tip," 
and I tried to follow mine. This necessitated 
reducing myself occasionally to the dimen- 
sions of a filament, but I was elastic, and I 
persisted. The brambles neatly extracted 
my hat-pins and dropped them in the tangle 
about my feet; they pulled off my hat, but I 
pushed painfully forward. They tore at my 
hair; they caught an end of my tie and drew 
out the bow. Finally they made a simul- 
taneous and well-planned assault upon my 
hair, my neck, my left arm, raised to push 
them back, and my right, extended to hold 
and guide that quivering, undulating rod. 
I was helpless, unless I wished to be torn in 
shreds. At that moment, as I stood poised, 
hot, bafl3ed, smarting and stinging with 
bramble scratches, wishing I could swear 
like a man and have it out, the air was filled 
with the liquid notes of a wood thrush. I 



A PLACID RUNAWAY 9 

love the wood thrush best of all ; but that he 
should choose this moment! It was the final 
touch. 

I whistled the blue- jay note, which means 
*'Come," and Jonathan came threshing 
through the brush, having left his rod. 

"Where are you.^^" he called; " I can't see 

you." 

"No, you can't," I responded unami- 
ably. "You probably never will see me 
again, at least not in any recognizable form. 
Help me out!" The thrush sang again, one 
tree farther away. "No! First kill that 
thrush!" I added between set teeth, as a 
slight motion of mine set the brambles raking 
again. 

"Why, why, my dear, what's this?" Then, 
as he caught sight of me, "Well ! You are tied 
up! Wait; I '11 get out my knife." 

He cut here and there, and one after an- 
other, with a farewell stab or scratch, the 
maddening things reluctantly let go their 
hold. Meanwhile Jonathan made placid 
remarks about the proper way to go through 
brush. "You go too fast, you know. You 
can't hurry these things, and you can't bully 



10 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

them. I don't see how you manage to get 
scratched up so. I never do." 

** Jonathan, you are as tactless as the 
thrush." 

"Don't kill me yet, though. Wait till I 
cut this last fellow. There! Now you're 
free. By George! But you 're a wreck ! " 

That was the last time I ever tried to 
"work through brush," as Jonathan calls it. 
If I can catch trout by any method compati- 
ble with sanity, I am ready to do it, but as 
for allowing myself to be drawn into a situa- 
tion wherein the note of the wood thrush stirs 
thoughts of murder in my breast — at that 
point, I opine, sport ceases. 

So on that day of our runaway I kept to 
open waters and preserved a placid mind. 
The air was full of bird notes — in the big 
open woods the clear "whick-ya, whick-ya, 
whick-ya" of the courting yellowhammers, 
in the meadows bluebirds with their shy, 
vanishing call that is over almost before you 
can begin to listen, meadowlarks poignantly 
sweet, song sparrows with a lift and a lilt and 
a carol, and in the swamps the red-wings 
triUing jubilant. 



A PLACID RUNAWAY 11 

Noon came, and we camped under the 
sunny lee of a ridge that was all abloom with 
hepaticas — clumps of lavender and white 
and rosy -lilac. We found a good spring, and 
a fallen log, and some dead hemlock tips to 
start a fire, and soon we had a merry blaze. 
Then Jonathan dressed some of the trout, 
while I found a black birch tree and cut 
forked sticks for broilers. Any one who has 
not broiled fresh-caught trout outdoors on 
birch forks — or spice bush will do almost as 
well — has yet to learn what life holds for 
him. Chops are good, too, done in that way. 
We usually carry them along when there is 
no prospect of fish, or, when we are sure of 
our country, we take a tin cup and buy eggs 
at a farmhouse to boil. But the balancing of 
the can requires a happy combination of 
stones about the fire that the brief nooning 
of a day's tramp seldom affords, and baking 
is still more uncertain. Bacon is good, but 
broiling the little slices — and how they do 
shrink ! — takes too long, while frying entails 
a pan. Curiously enough, a pan, in addition 
to two fish baskets and a landing-net, does 
not find favor in Jonathan's eyes. 



n THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

After luncheon and a long, lazy rest on our 
log we went back to the stream and loitered 
down its bank. Pussy-willows, their sleek sil- 
ver paws bursting into fat, caterpillary things, 
covered us with yellow pollen powder as we 
brushed past them. Now and then we were 
arrested by the sharp fragrance of the spice 
bush, whose little yellow blossoms had es- 
caped our notice. In the damp hollows the 
ground was carpeted with the rich, mottled 
green leaves and tawny yellow bells of the 
adder's-tongue, and the wet mud was sweet 
with the dainty, short-stemmed white violets. 
On the dry, barren places were masses of saxi- 
frage, bravely cheerful; on the rocky slopes 
fragile anemones blew in the wind, and fluiffy 
green clumps of columbine lured us on to a 
vain search for an early blossom. 

As the afternoon waned, and the wind 
freshened crisply, we guessed that it was 
milking-time, and wandered up to a farm- 
house where we persuaded the farmer's wife 
to give us bread and cheese and warm new 
milk. We were urged to "set inside," but 
preferred to take the great white pitcher of 
milk out to the steps of the little back porch 



A PLACID RUNAWAY 13 

where we could hear the insistent note of the 
little phoebe that was building under the 
eaves of the woodshed. Our hostess stood in 
the doorway, watching in amused tolerance 
as we filled and refilled our goblets. They 
were wonderful goblets, be it said — the best 
the house afforded. Jonathan's was of fancy 
green glass, all covered with little knobs ; mine 
was yellow, with a head of Washington 
stamped on one side, and "God Bless our 
Country" on the other. Finally the good 
woman broke the silence — "Guess your 
mothers ain't never weaned ye." Which we 
were not in a position to refute. 

On our return train we found the same 
conductor who had taken us out in the morn- 
ing. As he folded back the green cover of 
our mileage book he could not forbear re- 
marking, quizzically, "Know how far you're 
goin' to-night?" 

"Jonathan," I said, as we settled to toast 
and tea before our home fireplace that even- 
ing, "I like running away. I don't blame 
horses." 



II 

An Unprogressive Farm 

Most of our friends, Jonathan's and mine, 
are occupying their summers in "reclaiming" 
old farms. We have an old farm, too, but we, 
I fear, are not reclaiming it, at least not very 
fast. We have made neither formal gardens 
nor water gardens nor rose arches; we have 
not built marble swimming-tanks, nor even 
cement ones; we have not naturalized forget- 
me-nots in the brook or narcissus in the mead- 
ows; we have not erected tea-houses on choice 
knolls, and after six years of occupancy there 
is still not a pergola or a sundial on the place ! 
And yet we are happy. 

To be happy on a farm like ours one must, 
I fancy, he either very old or very unpro- 
' gressive. While we are waiting to grow com- 
fortably old, we are willing to be considered 
unprogressive. 

Very old and very, very unprogressive is 
the farm itseK. There is nothing on it but 



AN UNPROGRESSIVE FARM 15 

old apple trees, old lilac bushes, old rocks, 
and old associations — and, to be sure, the 
old red house. But the old rocks, piled on the 
hillsides, are unfailingly picturesque, whether 
dark and dripping in the summer rains or 
silver gray in the summer suns. The lilacs 
are delightful, too. In June they send wave 
upon wave of fragrance in through the little 
windows, penetrating even to the remotest 
corners of the dim old attic, while all day long 
about their pale lavender sprays the great 
yellow and black butterflies hang flutteringly. 
Best of all is the orchard; the old apple trees 
blossom prodigally for a brief season in May, 
blossom in rosy-white, in cream-white, in 
pure white, in green-white, transforming the 
lane and the hill-slopes into a bower, smother- 
ing the old house in beauty, brooding over it, 
on still moonlight nights, in pale clouds of 
sweetness. And then comes a wind, with a 
drenching rain, and tears away all the pretty 
petals and buries them in the grass below. 
But there are seldom any apples; all this 
exuberance of beauty is but a dream of youth, 
not a promise of fruitage. Jonathan, indeed, 
tells me that if we want the trees to bear we 



16 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

must keep pigs in the orchard to root up the 
ground and eat the wormy fruit as it falls ; but 
under these conditions I would rather not 
have the apples. The orchard is old; why not 
leave it to dream and rest and dream again? 

The old associations are, I admit, of a 
somewhat mixed character. There is the 
romance of the milk-room door, through 
which, in hoary ages past, the "hired girl," 
at the ripe age of twelve, eloped with her 
sixteen-year-old lover; there is the story of 
the cellar nail, a shuddery one, handed down 
from a yet more remote antiquity; there are 
tales of the "ballroom" on the second floor, of 
the old lightning-riven locust stump, of the 
origin of the "new wing" of the house — still 
called "new," though a century old. Not a 
spot, indoors or out, but has its clustering 
memories. 

Such an enveloping atmosphere of associa- 
tions, no matter what their quality, in a place 
where generations have lived and died, is of 
itself a quieting thing. Life, incrusted with 
tradition, like a ship weighted with barnacles, 
moves more and more slowly; the past ap- 
pears more real than the present. To the old 



AN UNPROGRESSIVE FARM 17 

this seems natural and right, to others it is 
often depressing; but Jonathan and I like it. 
Our barnacle-clogged ship pleases us — 
pleases me because I love the slow, drifting 
motion, pleases Jonathan because — I regret 
to admit it — he thinks he can get all the 
barnacles off — and then ! — 

For, whereas my unprogressiveness is ab- 
solute and unqualified, Jonathan's is, I have 
discovered, tainted by a sneaking optimism, 
an ineradicable desire and hope of improve- 
ment, which, though it does not blossom 
rankly in pergolas and tea-houses, is none the 
less there, a lurking menace. It inspired his 
suggestion regarding pigs in the orchard, it 
showed itself even more clearly in the matter 
of the hens. ■ 

I have always liked hens. I doubt if mine 
are very profitable, — the farm is not, in 
general, a source of profit, and we cherish no 
delusions about it, — but I do not keep them 
for pecuniary gain. If they chance to lay 
eggs, so much the better; if they furnish forth 
my table with succulent broilers, with nutri- 
tious roasters, with ambrosial chicken-pasties, 
I am not unappreciative; but I realize that all 



18 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

these things might be had from my neighbors' 
barnyards. What I primarily value my own 
hehs for is their companionship. Talk about 
the companionship of dogs and cats! Cats 
walk about my home, sleek and superior; 
they make me feel that I am there on suffer- 
ance. One cannot even laugh at them, their 
manner is so perfect. Dogs, on the other 
hand, develop an unreasoning and tyrannous 
devotion to their masters, which is not really 
good for either, though it may be morbidly 
gratifying to sentimental natures. 

But hens ! No decorous superiority here, no 
mush of devotion. No; for varied folly, for 
rich and highly developed perversities, com- 
bining all that is choicest of masculine and 
feminine foible — for this and much more, 
commend me to the hen. Ever since we came 
to the farm, my sister the hen has entertained 
me with her vagaries. Jaques's delight at his 
encounter with Touchstone is pale compared 
with mine in their society. Nothing cheers 
me more than to sit on a big rock in the barn- 
yard and watch the hens walking about. 
Their very gait pleases me — the way they 
bob their heads, the ''genteel" way they have 



AN UNPROGRESSIVE FARM 19 

of picking up their feet, for all the world as 
though they cared where they stepped; the 
absent and superior manner in which they 
** scratch for worms," their gaze fixed on the 
sky, then cock their heads downwards with 
an indifferent air, absently pick up a chip, 
drop it, and walk on ! Did any one ever see a 
hen really find a worm? I never did. There 
are no worms in our barnyard, anyhow; 
Jonathan must have dug them all up for bait 
when he was a boy. I have even tried throw- 
ing some real worms to them, and they always 
respond by a few nervous cackles, and walk 
past the brown wrigglers with a detached 
manner, and the robins get them later. And 
yet they continue to go through all these 
forms, and we continue to call it "scratching 
for worms." 

Jonathan has nothing to do with my hens 
except to give advice. One of his hobbies is 
the establishing of a breed of hens marked by 
intelligence, which he maintains might be 
done by careful selection of the mothers. 
Accordingly, whenever he goes to the roost 
to pick out a victim for the sacrificial hatchet, 
he first gently pulls the tail of each candidate 



20 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

in turn, and by the dim light of the lantern 
carefully observes the nature of their reaction, 
choosing for destruction the one whose de- 
portment seems to him most foolish. In this 
way, by weeding out the extremely silly, he 
hopes in time to raise the general intellectual 
standard of the barnyard. But he urges that 
much more might be done if my heart were in 
it. Very likely, but my heart is not. Intelli- 
gence is all very well, but the barnyard, I am 
convinced, is no place for it. Give me my 
pretty, silly hens, with all their aimless, silly 
ways. I will seek intelligence, when I want it, 
elsewhere. 

In another direction, too, Jonathan's op- 
timistic temperament has found little encour- 
agement. This is in regard to the chimney 
swallows. When we first came, these little 
creatures were one of my severest trials. 
They were not a trial to Jonathan. He loved 
to watch them at dusk, circling and eddying 
about the great chimney. So, indeed, did I; 
and if they had but contented themselves 
with circling and eddying there, I should 
have had no quarrel with them. I did not even 
object to their evolutions inside the chimney. 



AN UNPROGRESSIVE FARM 21 

At first I took the muffled shudder of wings 
for distant thunder, and when great masses 
of soot came tumbling down into the fireplace, 
I jumped; but I soon grew accustomed to all 
this. I was even willing to clean the soot out 
of my neat fireplace daily, while Jonathan 
comforted me by suggesting that the birds 
took the place of chimney-sweeps, and that 
soot was good for rose bushes. Yes, if the 
little things had been willing to stick to their 
chimney, I should have been tolerant, if not 
cordial. But when they invaded my domain, 
I felt that I had a grievance. And invade it 
they did. At dawn I was rudely awakened by 
a rush from the fireplace, a mad scuttering 
about the dusky room, a desperate exit by the 
little open window, where the raised shade 
revealed the pale light of morning. At night, 
if I went with my candle into a dark room, I 
was met by a whirling thing, dashing itself 
against me, against the light, against the 
walls, in a moth-like ecstasy of self-destruc- 
tion. In the mornings, as I went about the 
house pulling up the shades and drawing back 
the curtains, out from their white folds rushed 
dark, winged shapes, whirring past my ears. 



^ 22 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

fluttering blindly about the room, sinking ex- 
hausted in inaccessible corners. They were as 
fooHsh as June bugs, fifty times bigger, and 
harder to catch. Moreover, when caught, 
they were not pretty; their eyes were in the 
top of their heads, hke a snake's, their expres- 
sion was low and cunning. They were almost 
as bad as bats! Worst of all, the young birds 
iad an untidy habit of tumbling out of the 
nests down into the fireplaces, whether there 
was a fire or not. Now, I have no conscien- 
tious objection to roasting birds, but I prefer 
to choose my birds, and to kill them first. 

One morning I had gathered and carried 
out of doors eight foolish, frightened, hud- 
dling things, and one dead young one from 
the sitting-room embers, and I returned to 
find Jonathan kneeling on the guest-room 
Jiearth, one arm thrust far up the chimney. 
^' What are you doing, Jonathan?" The next 
moment there was the familiar rush of wings, 
which finally subsided behind the fresh pil- 
lows of the bed. Jonathan sprang up. *' Wait! 
I'll get it!" He carefully drew away the pil- 
low, his hand was almost on the poor little 
quivering wretch, when it made another 



AN UNPROGRESSIVE FARM 23 

rush, hurled itself against the mirror, upset a 
vase full of columbines, and finally sank be- 
hind the wood-box. At last it was caught, and 
Jonathan, going over to the hearth, resumed 
his former position. "Jonathan! Put him 
out of doors!" I exclaimed. "Sh-h-h," he 
responded, "I'm going to teach him to go 
back the way he came. There he goes! see.'*" 
He rose, triumphant, and began to brush the 
soot out of his collar and hair. I was sorry to 
dash such enthusiasm, but I felt my resolu- 
tion hardening within me. 

''Jonathan," I said, "we did not come to 
the farm to train chimney swallows. Besides, 
I don't wish them trained, I wish them Icept 
out, I don't regard them as suitable for house- 
hold pets. If you will sink to a pet bird, get a 
canary." 

"But you wouldn't have an old house 
without chimney swallows ! " he remonstrated 
in tones of real pain. 

"I would indeed." 

It ended in a compromise. At the top of 
the chimney Jonathan put a netting over half 
the flues; the others he left open at the top, 
but set in nettings in the corresponding flues 



24 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

just above each fireplace. And so in half the 
chimney the swallows still build, but the 
young ones now drop on the nettings instead 
of in the embers, and lie there cheeping shrilly 
until somehow their parents or friends convey 
them up again where they belong. And I no 
longer spend my mornings collecting apron- 
fulsof frightened and battered little creatures. 
At dusk the swallows still eddy and circle 
about the chimney, but Jonathan has lost the 
opportunity for training them. Once more 
the optimist is balked. 

But in these matters I am firm: I do not 
want the hens made intelligent, or the orchard 
improved, or the swallows trained. There is, 
I am sure, matter enough in other parts of the 
farm upon which one may wreak one's optim- 
ism. I hold me to my tidy hearths, my com- 
fortable hens, my old lilacs, and my dream- 
ing apple trees. 



m 

A Desultory Pilgrimage 

Many of our friends seem to be taking auto- 
mobile trips during the summer months — 
very rapid trips, since, as they explain, "it 
strains the machine to go too slowly, you 
know." Jonathan and I wanted to take a trip 
too, and we looked about us on the old farm 
for a conveyance. The closest scrutiny failed 
to discover an automobile, but there were 
other vehicles — there was the old sleigh in 
the back of the woodshed, where the hens 
loved to steal nests, and the old surrey, 
shabby but willing, and the business wagon, 
still shabbier but no less willing; there were 
the two lumber wagons, one rather more 
lumbering than the other; and there were also 
various farming vehicles whose names and 
uses I have never fathomed, with knives and 
long raking arrangements, very uncomfortable 
to step over when hunting in the dark corners 
of the barns for hens' nests or new kittens. 



26 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

Moreover, there was Kit, the old bay mare, 
also shabby but willing. That is, willing 
''within reason," although it must be admitted 
that Kit's ideas of what was reasonable were 
distinctly conservative. The chief practical 
difference between Kit and an automobile, 
considered as a motive power, was that it did 
not strain Kit in the least to go slowly. This 
we considered an advantage, slow-going 
being what we particularly wished, and we 
decided that Kit would do. 

For our conveyance we chose the business 
wagon — a plain box body, with a seat across 
and room behind for a trunk; but in addition 
Jonathan put in a shallow box under the seat, 
nailed to cleats on the bottom of the wagon so 
that it would not shift and rain would run 
under it. In this we put the things we needed 
by the roadside — the camping-kit, drink- 
ing-cups, bait-boxes, camera, and so on. Then 
we stowed our trout rods and baskets, and 
one morning in June we started. 

Our plan was to drive and fish through the 
day, cook our own noon meal, and put up at 
night wherever we could be taken in, avoid- 
ing cities and villages as far as possible. Be- 



A DESULTORY PILGRIMAGE 27 

yond that we had no plan. Indeed, this was 
the best of it all, that we did not have to get 
anywhere in particular at any particular time. 
We did not decide on one day where we would 
go the next; we did not even decide in the 
morning where we would go in the afternoon. 
If we found a brook where the trout bit, and 
there was no inhospitable "poster" warning 
us away, we said, "Let's stay! who cares 
whether we get on or not?" And we tied Kit 
to a tree, took out our rods and baskets, and 
followed the brook. If noon found us still 
fishing, we came back to the wagon, fed Kit, 
got out our camping-outfit, and cooked our 
fish for luncheon. It did not take long. I col- 
lected kindling and firewood while Jonathan 
was laying a few big stones for a fireplace 
shaped like a squared letter "C," open 
towards the wind and big enough to hold our 
frying-pan. Then we started the fire, and 
while it was settling into shape Jonathan 
dressed the fish and cut a long stick to fit into 
the hollow handle of the frying-pan, and I had 
time to slice bits of pork and set out the rest 
of the luncheon — bread and butter, milk if 
we happened to have passed a dairy farm, a 



28 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

pineapple or oranges if we happened to have 
met a peddler, strawberries if we had chanced 
upon one of the sandy spots where the wild 
ones grow so thickly. 

Then the pan was set over, the pork was 
laid in, and soon the little fish were curling up 
their tails in the fragrant smoke. If they were 
big and needed long cooking, I had time to 
toast bread or biscuit in the embers under- 
neath for an added luxury, and when all was 
ready we sat down in supreme contentment. 
And we never forgot to give Kit a lump of 
sugar, or some clover tops, that she might 
share in the picnic. But every now and then 
she would turn and regard us with eyes that 
expressed many things, but chiefly wonder 
at the queerness of folks who could prefer not 
to go back to their own stable to eat. When 
luncheon was over, the dishes washed in the 
brook, and the wagon repacked, we ambled 
on, leaving our little fireplace, with its black- 
ened stones and its heart of gray ashes. 

No one who has never tried such an aimless 
life can realize its charm and its restfulness. 
Most of us spend our days catching trains, 
and running to the telephone, and meeting 



A DESULTORY PILGRIMAGE 29 

engagements. Even our pleasures are seldom 
emancipated from these requirements; they 
are dependent on boats and trolley cars and 
trains, they are measured out in hours and 
minutes, and we snatch them running, as the 
Israelites did their water. But this trip of ours 
was bounded only by the circle of the week, 
and conditioned only by the limitations of Kit. 
No one could telephone to us, even at night, 
because no one knew where we were to be. As 
for trains, we never once saw one. Now and 
then we heard one whistle, so far away that 
it merely emphasized its own remoteness, and 
a few times we were compelled to cross over 
or under a track — a very little track, and 
single at that; beyond this our connection 
with the symbol of Hurry did not go. 

The limitations of Kit were indeed definite 
and insurmountable. While her speed on a 
level was most moderate, uphill it was actu- 
ally glacial, and going downhill it was little 
better. For Kit had come from the level West, 
and being, as we have said, conservative, she 
could never reach any real understanding of 
hills. She was willing and conscientious, but 
prudent, and although she went downhill 



30 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

when she was requested to, she did it very 
much as an old lady might go down a precip- 
ice — she let herself down, half sitting, with 
occasional gentle groans, rocking from side to 
side like a boat in a chop sea. Now all New 
England is practically either uphill or down- 
hill, and, if we had been in any haste, these 
characteristics of Kit might have annoyed us; 
but inasmuch as we did not care where we 
went or when we got there, what difference 
did it make? In fact, it was rather a relief to 
be thus firmly bound to sobriety. 

In one respect we could not be absolutely 
irresponsible, however. We found it advisable 
to seek out our night's lodging while it was 
yet light enough for the farmer's wife to look 
us over and see that we were respectable. 
Our first night out we failed to realize this, and 
we paid for it by being forced to put up at a 
commonplace village inn, instead of a farm- 
house. After that we managed to begin our 
search for a hostess about milking-time, and 
we had little further trouble. Indeed, one of 
the pleasures of the week was the hospitality 
we received; and our opinion of the New 
England farmer, his wife and his children. 



A DESULTORY PILGRIMAGE 31 

grew higher as the days passed. Courteous 
hospitality, or, if hospitality had to be with- 
held, courteous regret, was the rule. Twice, 
when one house could not take us in, they 
telephoned — for the telephone is everywhere 
now — about the neighborhood among friends 
until they found a lodging for us. And pleas- 
ant lodgings they always proved. 

One exception there was. We drew up one 
afternoon by a well-kept little house with a 
good English name on the post-box, and, as 
usual, I held the reins while Jonathan went 
up to the side door to make inquiries. After 
he had started up the path I saw, from my 
vantage-point, the lady of the farm returning 
from her "garden patch," and my heart went 
out in pity to Jonathan. If I could have called 
him back I would have done so, merely on the 
testimony of the lady's gait and figure. I had 
never fully realized how expressive these 
could be. Her hips, her shoulders, the set of 
her head, the way she planted her feet on 
the uneven flagging-stones of the path, each 
heavy line and each sodden motion, bespoke 
inhospitality, intolerance, impenetrable dis- 
approval of everything unfamiliar. I watched 



32 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

Jonathan turn back from the door at the 
sound of her steps, and in the short colloquy 
that followed, though I could hear nothing, 
I could see those hips and shoulders settling 
themselves yet more decisively, while Jona- 
than's attitude grew more studiously courte- 
ous. But when he had lifted his hat again and 
turned from that monument of immobile 
unpleasantness I saw his face relax into lines, 
partly of amusement, partly of chagrin; and 
as he took his seat beside me and drove on, he 
murmured snatches of quotation — "No; 
couldn't possibly," "No; don't know any- 
body that could," "No; never did such a 
thing," "No; the people in the next house 've 
just had a funeral; sure they could n't"; and 
finally he broke into a chuckle as he quoted, 
"Well, there is some folks about two mile 
down might mebbe take ye; they does some- 
times harbor peddlers 'n' such like." Jona- 
than was hardly willing to try again so near 
by; he regarded the whole neighborhood as 
tainted. Yet it was little more than two miles 
beyond, on that same afternoon, that we 
found lodgings with the most delightful, the 
most hospitable friends of all — for friends 



A DESULTORY PILGRIMAGE 33 

they became, taking us into their circle as if 
we belonged to it by right of birth, coddling 
us as one ought never to expect to be coddled 
save by one's own mother or grandmother. 

Ostensibly, our drive was a trout -fishing 
trip, and part of the fun certainly was the 
fishing. Not that we caught so many. If we 
had seriously wished to make a score, we might 
better have stayed at home and fished in our 
own haunts, where we knew every pool and 
just how and when to fish it. But it was inter- 
esting to explore new brooks, and as we never 
failed to get enough trout for at least one 
meal a day, what more could we wish.^^ And 
such brooks ! New England is surely the land 
of beautiful brooks. They are all lovely — 
the meadow brooks, gliding silently beneath 
the deep-tufted grasses, where the trout live 
in shadow even at noonday, and their speckled 
flanks are dark like the pools they lie in; the 
pasture brooks, whose clear water is always 
golden from the yellow sand and pebbles and 
leaves it ripples over, and the trout are sil- 
very and pale-spotted; the brooks of the deep 
woods, where the foam of rapids and the spray 
of noisy little waterfalls alternate with the 



34 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

stillness of rock-bound, hemlock-shadowed 
pools. All the brooks we followed, whether 
with good luck or with bad, I remember with 
delight. No, all except one. But I do not 
blame the brook. 

It happened in this way: One Monday 
morning, after an abstemious Sunday, the 
zeal of Jonathan brought us forth at dawn — 
in fact, a little before dawn. I had consented, 
because, although my zeal compared to Jona- 
than's is as a flapping hen compared to a soar- 
ing eagle, yet I reflected that I should enjoy 
the sunrise and the early bird-songs. We 
emerged, therefore, in the dusk of young 
morning, and I had my first reward in a lovely 
view of meadows half-veiled in silvery mist, 
where the brook wound, and upland pastures 
of pale gray-green against ridges of shadowy 
woods. But I was not prepared for the sensa- 
tion produced by the actual plunge into those 
same meadows. I say plunge advisedly. I 
shiver yet as I recall the icy chill of that dew- 
drenched grass. It was worse than wading a 
brook, because there was no reaction. Jona- 
than, however, did not seem depressed by it, 
so I followed his eager steps without remark. 



A DESULTORY PILGRIMAGE 85 

We reached the brook, we put our rods to- 
gether, and baited. "Crawl, now," admon- 
ished Jonathan; "they're shy fellows in those 
open pools." We crawled, dropped in, and 
waited. My teeth were chattering, my lips 
felt blue, but I would not be beaten by a little 
wet grass. After a few casts, Jonathan mur- 
mured, "That's funny," and moved cau- 
tiously on to the next pool. Then he tried 
swift water, then little rapids. I proceeded in 
chilly meekness, glad of a chance at a little 
exercise now and then when we had to climb 
around rocks or over a stone wall. Occasion- 
ally I straightened up and gazed out over the 
meadows — those clammy meadows — and 
up toward the high woods, brightening into 
the deep greens of daylight. The east was all 
rose and primrose, but I found myself unable 
to think of the sun as an aesthetic feature; I 
longed for its good, honest heat. A stove, or a 
hot soapstone, would have done as well. 

After a quarter of a mile of this I ventured 
a remark — "Jonathan, you have often told 
me of the delights of dawn fishing." Jonathan 
was extricating his line from an alder bush, 
and did not answer. I could not resist adding. 



36 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

''I think you said that the trout — bit — at 
dawn." Continued silence warned me that I 
had said enough, and I tactfully changed the 
subject: "What I am sorry for is the birds* 
nests up in those fields. How do the eggs ever 
hatch — in ice water! And how do the straw- 
berries ever ripen, in cold storage every night 
— ugh ! Let 's go back and get some hot coffee 
and go to bed ! " 

And that is my one experience with dawn 
fishing. But Jonathan, reacting from the 
experience with the temper of the true en- 
thusiast, still maintains that trout do bite at 
dawn. Perhaps they do. But for me, no more 
early-dewy meadows, except to look at. 

Those hours of dawn fishing were the hard- 
est work I did during the week. A lazy week, 
in truth, and an irresponsible one. Every one 
who can should snatch such a week and see 
what it does for him. In some ways it was 
better than camping, because camping, unless 
you have guides, is undoubtedly hard work, 
especially if you keep moving — work that 
one would never grudge, yet hard w^ork never- 
theless. The omitting of the night camp cut 
out practically all the work and made it more 



A DESULTORY PILGRIMAGE 37 

comfortable for the horse, while our noon 
camps made us independent all day, and gave 
us that sense of being at home outdoors that 
one never gets if one has to run to cover for 
every meal. 

And, curiously enough, the spots that seem 
homelike to me, as I linger in memory among 
the scenes of that week, are not the places 
where we spent the nights, pleasant though 
they were, but rather the spots where we 
built our little fireplaces. Each was for an 
hour our hearth-fire, — our own, — and I do 
not forget them, — some beside the open road, 
one on a ridge where the sun slants across as it 
goes down among purpling hills; one in the 
deep woods, by a little trout brook, where the 
sound of running water never ceases; one in 
an open grove by the river we love best, where 
a tiny brook with brown pools full of the shad- 
owy trout empties its cold waters into the 
big, warm current. Perhaps no one else may 
notice them, but they are there, waiting for 
us, if haply we may pass that way again. And 
if we do, we shall surely pause and give them 
greeting. 



IV 

The Yellow Valley 

We were on our way to the Yellow Valley. 
We had been pushing against the wind, 
through the red March mud of a ploughed 
field. Mud is a very good thing in its place, 
and if its place is not a ploughed field in 
March, I know of no better. But it does not 
encourage lightness of foot. At an especially 
big and burly gust of wind I stopped, turned 
my back for respite, and dropped into the lee 
of Jonathan. Wind is a good thing, too, in its 
place, but one does not care to drown in it. 

"Jonathan," I gasped, "this is n't spring; 
it's winter of the most furious description. 
Let's reform the calendar and put up signs 
to warn the flowers. But I want my spring! 
I want it now ! " 

"Well," said Jonathan, "there it is. Look!" 
And he pointed across the brush of the near 
fence line, where a meadow stretched away, 
brown with the stubble and matted tangle of 



THE YELLOW VALLEY 39 

last year's grass. Halfway up the springy 
slope, in a little fold of the hillside, was a shim- 
mer of green — vivid, wonderful. 

I forgot the wind. "Oh-h! Think of being 
a cow now and eating that! Eating spring 
itself!" 

"If you were a cow," said Jonathan, with 
the usual masculine command of applicable 
information, "they would n't let you eat it." 

"They would n't! Why not.^ Does it make 
them sick.f^" 

"No; crazy." 

"Crazy!" 

"Just that. Crazy for grass. They won't 
touch hay any more, and there is n't enough 
grass for them — and there you are!" 

"Did you make that up as you went along, 
Jonathan .f^" 

"Ask any farmer." 

But I think I will not ask a farmer. He 
might say it was not true, and I like to think 
it is. I am sorry the cows cannot have their 
grass, but glad they have the good taste to 
refuse hay. I should, if I were a cow. Not 
being one, I do not need an actual patch of 
green nibble to set me crazy. The smell of the 



40 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

earth after a thaw, a breath of soft air, a wave 
of dehcious sweetness, in April, in March, in 
February, — when it comes in January I 
harden my heart and try not to notice, — 
this is enough to spoil me for the dry fodder of 
winter. Hay may be good and wholesome, 
but I have had my taste of spring grass, and 
it is enough. That or nothing. No more hay 
for me ! 

What that strange sweetness of the early 
spring is I have never fully discovered. The 
fragrance of flowers is in it, — hepaticas, 
white violets, arbutus, — yet it is none of 
these. It comes before any of the flowers are 
even astir, when the arbutus buds are still 
tight little green points, when the hepaticas 
have scarcely pushed open their winter 
sheaths, while their soft little gray-furred 
heads are still tucked down snugly, like a 
bird's head under its wing. Before even the 
snowdrops at our feet and the maples over- 
head have thought of blossoming, a soft 
breath may blow across our path filled with 
this wondrous fragrance. It is like a dream of 
May. One might believe the fairies were pass- 
ing by. 



THE YELLOW VALLEY 41 

For years I was completely bafl3ed by it. 
But one March, in the farm orchard, I found 
out part of the secret. I was planting my 
sweet peas, when the well-remembered and 
bewildering fragrance blew across me. I 
sprang up and ran up the wind, and there, in 
the midst of the old orchard, I came upon an 
old apple tree just cut down by the thrift of 
Jonathan's farmer, who has no silly weakness 
for old apple trees. The fresh-cut wood was 
moist with sap, and as I bent over it — ah, 
there it was! Here were my hepaticas, my 
arbutus, here in the old apple tree! Such a 
surprise ! I sat down beside it to think it over. 
I was sorry it was cut down, but glad it had 
told me its secret before it was made into 
logs and piled in the woodshed. Blazing in 
the fireplace it would tell me many things, 
but it might perhaps not have told me 
that. 

And so I knew part of the secret. But only 
part. For the same fragrance has blown to 
me often where there were no orchards and 
no newly felled apple trees, and I have never, 
except this once, been able to trace it. If it is 
the flowing sap in all trees, why are not the 



42 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

spring woods full of it? But they are not full 
of it; it comes only now and then, with tan- 
talizing capriciousness. Do sound trees ex- 
hale it, certain kinds, when the sap starts, or 
must they have been cut or bruised, if not by 
the axe, perhaps by the winter winds and 
the ice storms? I do not know. I only know 
that when that breath of sweetness comes, 
it is the very breath of spring itself; it is 
the call of spring out of winter — spring 
grass. 

When the call of the spring grass comes, 
there is always one spot that draws me with a 
special insistence, and every year we have 
much the same talk about it. 

"Jonathan," I say, "let's go to the Yellow 
Valley." 

"Why," says Jonathan, "there will be 
more new birds up on the ridge." 

"I don't care about new birds. The old 
ones do very well for me." 

"And you might find the first hepaticas 
under Indian Rock." 

"I know. We'll go there next." 

"And if we went farther up the river, we 
might see some black duck." 



THE YELLOW VALLEY 43 

**Very likely; but I don't feel as if I par- 
ticularly had to see black duck to-day." 
*'What do you have to see?" 
"Nothing special. Just plain spring." 
That is the charm of the Yellow Valley. 
It offers no spectacular inducements, no bar- 
gain-counter attractions in the shape of new 
arrivals among the birds or flowers. One re- 
turns from it with no trophies of any kind, 
nothing to put down in one's notebook, if 
one keeps a notebook, — from which industry 
may I be forever preserved ! But it is a place 
to go to and be quiet, which is good for us all, 
especially in the springtime, when there is so 
much going on in the world, and especially 
lately, since "nature study" has driven peo- 
ple into being so unceasingly busy when they 
are outdoors. Opera-glasses and bird books 
have their place, no doubt, in the advance of 
mankind, but they often seem to me nothing 
but more machinery coming in between us 
and the real things. Perhaps it was once true 
that when people went out to view "nature," 
they did not see enough. Now, I fancy, they 
see too much; they cannot see the spring for 
the birds. Their motto is that of Rikki-Tikki, 



44 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

the mongoose, "Run and find out" — an 
excellent motto for a mongoose, — but for 
people on a spring ramble ! 

The unquenchable ardor of the bird lover, 
so called, fills me with dismay. One enthus- 
iast, writing in a school journal, describes the 
difficulties of following up the birds: *' Often 
eyes all around one's head, with opera-glasses 
focused at each pair, would not suffice to keep 
the restless birds in view." If this is the ideal 
of the bird lover, it is not mine. I wonder she 
did not wish for extra pairs of legs to match 
each set of eyes and opera-glasses, and a divis- 
ible body, so that she might scamper off in 
sections after all these marvels. For myself, 
one pair of eyes gives me, I find, all the satis- 
faction and delight I know what to do with, 
and I cannot help feeling that, if I had more, I 
should have less. The same writer speaks of 
the ** maddening" warbler notes. Why mad- 
dening? Because, forsooth, there are thirty 
warblers, and one cannot learn all their 
names. What a pity to be maddened by a little 
warbler! And about a matter of names, too. 
After all, the bird, the song, is the thing. And 
it seems a pity to carry the chasing of bird 



THE YELLOW VALLEY 45 

notes quite so far. They are meant, I feel 
sure, to be hearkened to in quietness of spirit, 
to be tasted delicately, as one would a wine. 
The life of the opera-glassed bird hunter, com- 
pared to mine, seems to me like the experi- 
ence of a tea-taster compared to that of one 
who sits in cozy and irresponsible enjoyment 
of the cup her friend hands her. 

And so there always comes a time in the 
spring when I must go to my Yellow Valley. 
A car ride, a walk on through plain little sub- 
urbs, a scramble across fields to a seldom-used 
railway track, a swing out along the ties, then 
off across more fields, over a little ridge, and 
— there! Oh, the soft glory of color! We are 
at the west end of a miniature valley, full of 
afternoon sunlight slanting across a level blur 
of yellows and browns. On one side low brown 
hills enfold it, on the other runs a swift little 
river, whose steep farther bank is overhung 
with hemlocks and laurel in brightening spring 
green. It is a very tiny valley, — one could 
almost throw a stone across it, — and the 
whole bottom is filled with waving grass, 
waist-high, of a wonderful pale straw color; 
last year's grass, which the winter snows 



46 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

never seem to mat down, thick-set with the 
tall brown stalks of last year's goldenrod and 
mullein and primrose. The trees and bushes 
are dwarf oaks, with their old leafage still 
clinging in tawny masses, and willows, with 
their bunches of slim, yellow shoots. Even the 
little river is yellow-brown, from the sand and 
pebbles and leaves of its bed, and the sun, as 
it slants down the length of the valley, wraps 
it in a warm, yellow haze. 

I call the valley mine, for no one else seems 
to know it. The long grass is never cut, but 
left to wave its glory of yellow all through the 
fall and winter and spring. There is a little 
footpath running through it, but I never see 
any one on it. I often wonder who makes 
all the footpaths I know, where no one ever 
seems to pass. Is it rabbits, or ghosts.^ Who- 
ever they may be, in this case they do not 
trouble me, and the valley is as much mine as 
though I had cut it out of a mediaeval romance. 

It is always very quiet here. At least it 
seems so, though full of sound, as the world 
always is. But its sounds are its own; perhaps 
that is the secret; the rustle of the oak leaves 
as the wind fumbles among them; the swish- 



THE YELLOW VALLEY 47 

swish of the long dry grasses, which can be 
heard only if one sits down in their midst, 
very still; the light, purling sounds of the 
river; the soft gush of water about some bend- 
ing branch as its tip catches and drags in the 
shifting current. The winds lose a little of 
their fierceness as they drop into the valley, 
and they seem to have left behind them all 
the sounds of the outer world which they usu- 
ally bear. If now and then they waft hither- 
ward the long call of a locomotive, they soften 
it till it is only a dreamy reminder. 

It is strange that in a spot so specially full 
of the tokens of last year's life, — the dry 
grasses, the old oak leaves not yet pushed off 
by the new buds, — where the only green is 
of the hemlocks and laurels that have weath- 
ered the winter, — it is strange that in such 
a spot one should feel the immanence of 
spring. Perhaps it is the bluebird that does it. 
For it is the bluebird's valley as well as mine. 
There are other birds there, but not many, 
and it is the bluebird which best voices the 
spirit of the place. Most birds in the spring 
imply an audience. The song sparrow, with 
the lift and the lilt of his song, sings to the 



48 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

universe; the red-wing calls to all the sunny 
world to be gleeful with him; the long-drawn 
sweetness of the meadowlark floats over 
broad meadows and wide horizons ; the bobo- 
link, in the tumbling eagerness of his jubila- 
tion, is for every one to hear. But the blue- 
bird sings to himself. His gentle notes, not 
heard but overheard, are for those who listen 
softly. And in the Yellow Valley he is at 
home. 

I am at home, too, and I find there some- 
thing that I find nowhere else so well. Its 
charm is in the simpleness of its appeal : — 

*'0nly the mightier movement sounds and passes. 
Only winds and rivers — " 

I bring back from it a memory of sunshine 
and grass, bird notes and running water, the 
broad realities of nature. Nay, more than a 
memory — a mood that holds — a certain 
poise of spirit that comes from a sense of the 
largeness and sweetness and suflSciency of the 
whole live, growing world. Spring grass — 
the rare fragrance of the spring air — is the 
call. The Yellow Valley holds the answer. 



V 

Larkspurs and Hollyhocks 

"Jonathan, let's not have a garden." 

"What 'II we live on if we don't?" 

" Oh, of course, I don't mean that kind of a 
garden, — peas and potatoes and things, — 
I mean flowers. Let's not have a flower 
garden." 

"That seems easy enough to manage," he 
ruminated; "the hard thing would be to have 
one." 

"I know. And what's the use.? There are 
always flowers enough, all around us, from 
May till October. Let's just enjoy them." 

"I always have." 

I looked at him to detect a possible sarcasm 
in the words, but his face was innocent. 

"Well, of course, so have I. But what I 
mean is — people when they have a country 
place seem to spend such a lot of energy doing 
things for themselves that nature is doing for 
them just over the fence. There was Christa- 



50 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

bel Vincent last summer, grubbing over yel- 
low lilies, or something, and I went over into 
the meadow and got a lovely armful of lilies 
and brought them in, and no grubbing at all." 

"Perhaps grubbing was what she was 
after," said Jonathan. 

"Well, anyway, she talked as if it was 
lilies." 

"I don't know that that matters," he said. 

Jonathan is sometimes so acute about my 
friends that it is almost annoying. 

This conversation was one of many that 
occurred the winter before we took up the 
farm. We went up in April that year, and we 
planted our corn and our potatoes and all the 
rest, but no flowers. That part we left to 
nature, and she responded most generously. 
From earliest spring until October — nay, 
November — we were never without flowers : 
brave little white saxifrage and hepaticas, 
first of all, then bloodroot and arbutus, ad- 
der's-tongue and columbine, shad-blow and 
dogwood, and all the beloved throng of 
them, at our feet and overhead. In May the 
pink azalea and the buttercups, in June the 



LARKSPURS AND HOLLYHOCKS 51 

laurel and the daisies and — almost best of 
all — the dear clover. In summer the deep 
woods gave us orchids, and the open mead- 
ows lilies and black-eyed Susans. In Sep- 
tember the river-banks and the brooks 
glowed for us with cardinal-flower and the 
blue lobelia, and then, until the frosts settled 
into winter, there were the fringed gentians 
and the asters and the goldenrod. And still 
the half has not been told. If I tried to 
name all that gay company, my tale would be 
longer than Homer's catalogue of the ships. 

In early July a friend brought me in a big 
bunch of sweet peas. I buried my face in their 
sweetness; then, as I held them off, I sighed. 

"Oh, dear!" I said. 

"What's *oh, dear ^ V said Jonathan, as he 
took off his ankle-clips. He had just come up 
from the station on his bicycle. 

"Nothing. Only why do people have ma- 
genta sweet peas with red ones and pink ones 
— that special pink.^ It's just the color of 
pink tooth-powder." 

"You might throw away the ones you don't 
like." 

" No, I can't do that. But why does any- 



52 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

body grow them? If I had sweet peas, I'd 
have white ones, and pale lavender ones, and 
those lovely salmon-pink ones, and maybe 
some pale yellow ones — " 

"Sweet peas have to be planted in March," 
said Jonathan, as he trundled his wheel ofiE 
toward the barn. 

"Of course," I called after him. "I'm not 
going to plant any. I was only saying ^f." 

Perhaps the sweet peas began it, but I 
really think the whole thing began with the 
phlox. 

One afternoon in August I walked down the 
road through the woods to meet Jonathan. 
As he came up to me and dismounted I held 
out to him a spray of white phlox. 

"Where do you suppose I found it.^" I 
asked. 

"Down by the old Talcott place," he 
hazarded. 

"No. There is some there, but this was 
growing under our crab-apple trees, right 
beside the house." 

"Well, now, it must have been some of 
Aunt Deborah's. I remember hearing Uncle 
Ben say she used to have her garden there; 



LARKSPURS AND HOLLYHOCKS 53 

that must have been before he started the 
crab orchard. Why, that phlox can't be less 
than forty years old, anyway." 

*'Dear me ! " I took back the delicate spray; 
"it does n't look it." 

"No. Don't you wish you could look like 
that when you're forty?" he philosophized; 
and added, "Is there much of it.'^" 

"Five or six roots, but there won't be many 
blossoms, it's so shady." 

"We might move it and give it a chance." 

"Let's! We'll dig it up this fall, and put it 
over on the south side of the house, in that 
sunny open place." 

When October came, we took Aunt Deb- 
orah's phlox and transplanted it to where it 
could get the sunshine it had been starving 
for all those years. I sat on a stump and 
watched Jonathan digging the holes. 

"You don't suppose Henry will cut them 
down for weeds when they come up, do you.^^ " 
I said. 

"Seems probable," said Jonathan. "You 
might stick in a few bulbs that'll come up 
early and mark the spot." 

"Oh, yes. And we could put a line of sweet 



54 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

alyssum along each side, to last along after 
the bulbs are over." 

"You can do that in the spring if you want 
to. I'll bring up some bulbs to-morrow." 

The winter passed and the spring came — 
sweet, tormenting. 

"Jonathan," I said at luncheon one day, 
"I got the sweet alyssum seed this morn- 
ing." 

"Sweet alyssum .f^" He looked blank. 
"What do you want sweet alyssum for? It's 
a foolish flower. I thought you were n't 
going to have a garden, anyway." 

"I'm not; but don't you remember about 
the phlox .f^ We said we'd put in some sweet 
alyssum to mark it — so it would n't get cut 
down." 

"The bulbs will do that, and when they're 
gone it will be high enough to show." 

"Well, I have the seed, and I might as well 
use it. It won't do any harm." 

"No. I don't believe sweet alyssum ever 
hurt anybody," said Jonathan. 

That evening when he came in I met him 
in the hall. I had the florist's catalogue in 



LARKSPURS AND HOLLYHOCKS 55 

my hand. ''Jonathan, it says Enghsh daisies 
are good for borders." 

"Borders ! What do you want of borders ? " 

"Why, up on the farm — the phlox, you 
know." 

"Oh, the phlox. I thought you had sweet 
alyssum for a border." 

He took off his coat and I drew him into 
the study. 

"Why, yes, but that was such a little pack- 
age. I don't believe there would be enough. 
And I thought I could try the English daisies, 
too, and if one did n't do well perhaps the 
other would. And look what it says — No, 
never mind the newspaper yet — there is n't 
any news — just look at this about pansies." 

"Pansies! You don't want them for a 
border!" 

"Why, no, not exactly. But, you see, the 
phlox won't blossom till late August, and it 
says that if you plant this kind of pansies very 
early, they blossom in June, and then if you 
cover them they live over and blossom again 
the next May. And pansies are so lovely! 
Look at that picture! Don't you love those 
French-blue ones?" 



56 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"I like pansies. I don't know about the 
nationalities," said Jonathan. ''Of course, if 
you want to bother with them, go ahead." 
He picked up his paper. 

"Oh, it won't be any bother. They take 
care of themselves. Please, your pencil — 
I'm going to mark the colors I want." 

We went up soon after to look at the farm. 
We found it very much as we had left it, 
except that there hung about it that indescrib- 
able something we call spring. We tramped 
about on the spongy ground, and sniffed the 
sweet air, and looked at the apple buds, and 
kicked up the soft, matted maple leaves to see 
the grass starting underneath. 

"Oh, Jonathan! Our bulbs!" I exclaimed. 
We hurried over to them and lifted up 
the thick blanket of leaves and hay we 
had left over them. "Look! A crocus!" I 
said. 

"And here's a snowdrop! Let's take off 
these leaves and give them a chance." 

"Dear me!" I sighed; "is n't it wonderful? 
To think those hard little bullets we put in 
last fall should do all this! And here's the 
phlox just starting — look — " 



LARKSPURS AND HOLLYHOCKS 57 

"Oh, you can't kill phlox," said Jonathan 
imperturbably. 

"All the better. I hate not giving people 
credit for things just because they come 
natural." 

"That is a curious sentence," said Jonathan. 

"Never mind. You know what I mean. 
You've understood a great many more curi- 
ous ones than that. Listen, Jonathan. Why 
could n't I put in my seeds now.'^ I brought 
them along." 

"Why — yes — it's pretty early for any- 
thing but peas, but you can try, of course. 
What are they.? Sweet alyssum and pansy.?" 

"Yes — and I did get a few sweet peas 
too," I hesitated. "I thought Henry had n't 
much to do yet, and perhaps he could make a 
trench — you know it needs a trench." 

"Yes, I know," said Jonathan. I think he 
smiled. "Let's see your seeds." 

"They're at the house. Come over to the 
south porch, where it 's warm, and we '11 plan 
about them." 

I opened the bundle and laid out the little 
packets with their gay pictures indicating 
what the seeds within might be expected to 



58 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

do. "'Sweet alyssum and pansies," I said, 
"and here are the sweet peas." 

Jonathan took them — "* Dorothy Eck- 
ford, Lady Grisel Hamilton, Gladys Unwin, 
Early Dawn, White Spencer.' By George! 
you mean to keep Henry busy! Here's ten 
ounces of peas!" 

"They were so much cheaper by the ounce," 
I murmured. 

"And — hold up! Did you know they 
gave you some asters.^ These are n't sweet 
peas." 

"No — I know — but I thought — you see, 
sweet peas are over by August, and asters 
go on all through October — don't you re- 
member what lovely ones Christabel had.?" 

"Hm! But is n't the world full of asters, 
anyway, in September and October, without 
your planting any more.?" He grinned a 
little. "I thought that was your idea — you 
said Christabel grubbed so." 

"Why, yes; but asters are n't any trouble. 
You just put them in — " 

"And weed them." 

"Yes — and weed them; but I wouldn't 
mind that." 



LARKSPURS AND HOLLYHOCKS 59 

"But here's some larkspur!" 

"Yes, but I did n't buy that," I explained, 
hurriedly. "Christabel sent me that. She 
thought I might like some from her garden — 
she has such lovely larkspurs, don't you re- 
member? And I just brought them along." 

"Yes. So I see. Is that all you've just 
brought along.?" 

"Yes — except the cosmos. The florist 
advised that, and I thought there might be a 
place for it over by the fence. And of course 
we need n't use it if we don't want to. I can 
give it to Mrs. Stone." 

"But here's some nasturtiums!" 

"Oh — I forgot about them — but I 
did n't buy them either. They came from 
the Department of Agriculture or something. 
There were some carrots and parsnips, and 
things like that, too, all in a big brown en- 
velope. I knew you had all the other things 
you wanted, so I just brought these. But of 
course I don't have to plant them, either." 

"But you don't like nasturtiums. You've 
always said they made you think of railway 
stations and soldiers' homes — " 

"Well, I did use to feel that way, — an- 



60 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

chors and crosses and rock-work on big 
shaved lawns, — and, besides, nasturtiums 
always seemed to be the sort of flowers that 
people picked with short stems, and tied up 
in a wad, and stuck in a blue-glass goblet, 
and set on a table with a red cover on it. I 
did have horrible associations with nastur- 
tiums." 

"Then why in thunder do you plant 
them?" 

**I only thought — if there was a drought 
this summer — you know they don't mind 
drought; Millie Sutphen told me that. And 
she had a way of cutting them with long 
stems, so they trailed, and they were really 
lovely. And then — there the package was — 
I thought it would n't do any harm to take 
it." 

"Oh, you don't have to apologize," said 
Jonathan. "I did n't understand your plan, 
that was all. I '11 go and see Henry about the 
trench." 

I sat on the sunny porch and the March 
wind swept by the house on each side of me. 
I gloated over my seed packets. Would they 
come up.f^ Of course other people's seeds came 



LARKSPURS AND HOLLYHOCKS 61 

up, but would mine? It was very exciting. I 
pinched open a corner of the Lady Grisel 
Hamiltons and poured some of the pretty, 
smooth, fawn-colored balls into my hand. 
Then I opened the cosmos — what funny 
long thin ones! How long should I have to 
wait till they began to come up.'^ I read the 
directions — "Plant when all danger from 
frost is past." Oh, dear! that meant May — 
another whole month! Well, I would get in 
my sweet peas and risk my pansies and alys- 
sum, anyhow. And I jumped off the porch 
and went back to the phlox to plan out my 
campaign. 

By early May we were settled on the farm 
once more. My pansies and alyssum were 
up — at least I believed they were up, but I 
spent many minutes of each day kneeling by 
them and studying the physiognomy of their 
cotyledons. I led Jonathan out to them one 
Sunday morning, and he regarded them with 
indulgence if not with enthusiasm. As he 
stooped to throw out a bunch of pebbles in 
one of the new beds I stopped him. "Oh, 
don't! Those are my Mizpah stones." 



62 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"Your what!" 

"Why, just some httle stones to mark a 
place. Some of the nasturtiums are there. I 
did n't know whether they were going to do 
anything — they looked so like chips — and 
then, being sent free that way — but they 
are." 

"How do you know.'^ They are n't up." 

"No, but they will be soon. I — why, I 
just thought I'd see what they were doing." 

"So you dug them up?" he probed. 

"Not them — just it — just one. That's 
why I marked the place. I did n't want to 
keep disturbing different ones. Now what are 
you laughing at.? Would n't you have wanted 
to know.? And you would n't want to dig up 
different ones all the time ! I don't know much 
about gardening, but — " 

"I'm not laughing," said Jonathan. "Of 
course I should have wanted to know. And 
it is certainly better not to dig up different 
ones. There! Have I put your Mizpah back 
right.?" 

A few days later Jonathan wheeled into 
the yard and over near where I was kneeling 



LARKSPURS AND HOLLYHOCKS 63 

by the phlox. "I saw a lady-slipper bud al- 
most out to-day," he said. 

"Did you.^ Look at my sweet alyssum. 
It's grown an inch since yesterday," I said. 
*' Don't you think I could plant my cosmos 
and asters now.^" 

"Thunder!" said Jonathan; "don't you 
care more about the pink lady-slipper than 
about your blooming little sweet alyssum .^^ " 

"Why, yes, of course. I love lady-slippers. 
You know I do," I protested; "only — you 
see — I can't explain exactly — but — it 
seems to make a difference when you plant a 
thing yourself. And, oh, Jonathan! Won't 
you please come here and tell me if these are 
young pansies or only plantain.^ I'm so 
afraid of pulling up the wrong thing. I do 
wish somebody would make a book with pict- 
ures of all the cotyledons of all the different 
plants. It 's so confusing. Millie had an awful 
time telling marigold from ragweed last sum- 
mer. She had to break off a tip of each leaf 
and taste it. Why do you just stand there 
looking like that.? Please come and help." 

But Jonathan did not move. He stood, 
leaning on his wheel, regarding me with open 



64 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

amusement, and possibly a shade of disap- 
proval. 

"Lord!" he finally remarked; *'you've got 
it!" 

''Got what?" I said, though I knew. 

''The garden germ." 

Yes. There was no denying it. I had it. I 
have it still, and there is very little chance of 
my shaking it off. It is a disease that grows 
with what it feeds on. Now and then, indeed, 
I make a feeble fight against its inroads: I 
will not have another flower-bed, I will not 
have any more annuals, I will have only 
things that live on from year to year and take 
care of themselves. But — 

"Alas, alas, repentance oft before 
I swore — but was I sober when I swore? 
And then — and then — came spring — " 

and the florist's catalogues! And is any one 
who has once given way to them proof against 
the seductions of those catalogues.^ Those 
asters! Those larkspurs! Those foxgloves 
and poppies and Canterbury bells! All that 
ravishing company, mine at the price of a few 
cents and a little grubbing. Mine ! There is 



LARKSPURS AND HOLLYHOCKS 65 

the secret of it. Out in the great and wonder- 
ful world beyond my garden, nature works 
her miracles constantly. She lays her riches 
at my feet; they are mine for the gathering. 
But to work these miracles myself, — to have 
my own little hoard that looks to me for tend- 
ing, for very life, — that is a joy by itself. 
My little garden bed gives me something that 
all the luxuriance of woods and fields can 
never give — not better, not so good, perhaps, 
but different. Once having known the thrill 
of watching the first tiny shoot from a seed 
that I have planted myself, once having fol- 
lowed it to leaf and flower and seed again, I 
can never give it up. 

My garden is not very big nor very beauti- 
ful. Perhaps the stretch of rocks and grass 
and weeds beside the house — an expanse 
which not even the wildest flight of the imagin- 
ation could call a lawn — perhaps this might 
be more pleasing if the garden were not there, 
but it is there, and there it will stay. It 
means much grubbing. Just putting in seeds 
and then weeding is, I find, no mere affair of 
rhetoric. Moreover, I am introduced through 
my garden to an entirely new set of troubles: 



66 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

beetles and cutworms and moles and hens 
and a host of marauding creatures above 
ground and below, whose number and energy 
amaze me. And each summer seems to add 
to their variety and resourcefulness. Clearly, 
the pleasures of a garden are not commensur- 
ate with its pains. And yet — 

But there is one kind of joy which it gives 
me at which even the Scoffer — to wit, Jona- 
than — does not scoff. It began with Aunt 
Deborah's phlox. Then came Christabel's 
larkspur. The next summer Mrs. Stone sent 
me over some of her hardy little fall asters — 
"artemishy," she called them. And Anne 
Stafford sent on some hollyhock seeds culled 
from Emerson's garden. And Great-Aunt 
Sarah was dividing her peony roots, and said 
I might take one. And Cousin Patty asked 
me if I would n't like some of her mother's 
old-fashioned pinks. And so it goes. 

And so it will go, I hope, to the end of the 
long day. Each year my garden has in it 
more of my friends, and as I look at it I 
can adopt poor Ophelia's pretty speech in a 
new meaning, and say, "Larkspur — that's 
for remembrance; hollyhocks — that's for 



LARKSPURS AND HOLLYHOCKS 67 

thoughts." Remembrance of all those dear 
other gardens which I have come to know, 
and in whose beauties I am coming to have a 
share; thoughts of all those dear other gar- 
deners upon whom, as upon me, the miracle 
of the seed has laid a spell from which they 
can never escape. 



VI 

The Farm Sunday 

I HAVE never been able to discover why it is 
that things always happen Sunday morning. 
We mean to get to church. We speak of it 
almost every Sunday, unless there is a steady 
downpour that puts it quite out of the ques- 
tion. But, somehow, between nine and ten 
o'clock on a Sunday morning seems to be the 
farm's busiest time. If there are new broods 
of chickens, they appear then; if there is a 
young calf coming, it is his birthday; if the 
gray cat — an uninvited resident of the barn 
— must go forth on marauding expeditions, 
he chooses this day for his evil work, and the 
air is rent with shrieks of robins, or of cat- 
birds, or of phoebes, and there is a \sTecked 
nest, and scattered young ones, half-fledged, 
that have to be gathered into a basket and 
hung up in the tree again by our united ef- 
forts. And always there is the same conversa- 
tion : 



THE FARM SUNDAY 69 

"Well, what about church?" 

"Church! It's half-past ten now." 

"We can't do it. Too bad!" 

"Now, if it had n't been for that cat!" — 
or that hen — or that calf! 

There are many Sunday morning stories 
that might be told, but one must be told. 

It was a hot, still Sunday in July. The 
hens sought the shade early, and stood about 
with their beaks half open and a distant look 
in their eyes, as if they saw you but chose to 
look just beyond you. It always irritates me 
to see the hens do that. It makes me feel 
hotter. Such a day it was. But things on 
the farm seemed propitious, and we said at 
breakfast that we would go. 

"I've just got to take that two-year-old 
Devon down to the lower pasture," said 
Jonathan, "and then I'll harness. We ought 
to start early, because it 's too hot to drive Kit 
fast." 

"Do you think you'd better take the cow 
down this morning.?" I said, doubtfully. 
"Could n't you wait until we come back.?" 

"No; that upper pasture is getting burned 
out, and she ought to get into some good 



70 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

grass this morning. I meant to take her down 
last night." 

"Well, do hurry." I still felt dubious. 

"Oh, it's only five minutes' walk down the 
road," said Jonathan easily. "I'm all ready 
for church, except for these shoes. I'll have 
the carriage at the door before you 're 
dressed." 

I said no more, but went upstairs, while 
Jonathan started for the barnyard. A few 
minutes later I heard from that direction 
the sounds of exhortation such as are usually 
employed towards "critters." They seemed 
to be coming nearer. I glanced out of a 
front window, and saw Jonathan and his cow 
coming up the road past the house. 

"Where are you taking her.^" I called. "I 
thought you meant to go the other way." 

"So I did," he shouted, in some irritation. 
"But she swung up to the right as she wxnt 
out of the gate, and I could n't head her oflF 
in time. Oh, there's Bill Russell. Head her 
round, will you. Bill.? There, now we're all 
right." 

"I'll be back in ten minutes," he called up 
at my window as he repassed. 



THE FARM SUNDAY 71 

I watched them go back up the road. At 
the big farm gate the cow made a break for the 
barnyard again, but the two men managed to 
turn her. Just beyond, at the fork in the road, 
I saw Bill turn down towards the cider-mill, 
while Jonathan kept on with his convoy over 
the hill. I glanced at the clock. It was not 
yet nine. There was plenty of time, of course. 

At half-past nine I went downstairs again, 
and wandered out toward the big gate. It 
seemed to me time for Jonathan to be back. 
In the Sunday hush I thought I heard sounds 
of distant **hi-ing." They grew louder; yes, 
surely, there was the cow, just appearing over 
the hill and trotting briskly along the road 
towards home. And there was Jonathan, also 
trotting briskly. He looked red and warm. 
I stepped out into the road to keep the cow 
from going past, but there was no need. She 
swung cheerfully in at the big gate, and fell to 
cropping the long grass just inside the fence. 

Jonathan slowed down beside me, and, 
pulling out his handkerchief, began flapping 
the dust off his trousers while he explained : — 

"You see, I got her down there all right, 
but I had to let down the bars, and while I 



K 



72 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

was doing that she went along the road a bit, 
and when she saw me coming she just kicked 
up her heels and galloped." 

** How did you stop her?" I asked. 

"I didn't. The Maxwells were coming 
along with their team, and they headed her 
back for me. Then they went on. Only by 
that time, you see, she was a bit excited, and 
when we came along back to those bars she 
shot right past them, and never stopped till 
she got here." 

I looked at her grazing quietly inside the 
fence. "She does n't look as though she had 
done so much," — and then, as I glanced at 
Jonathan, I could not forbear saying, — "but 
you do." 

"I suppose I do." He gave his trousers a 
last flick, and, putting up his handkerchief, 
shifted his stick to his right hand. 

"Well, put her back in the inner yard," I 
said, "and this afternoon I'll help you." 

"Put her back!" said Jonathan. "Not 
much ! You don't think I 'd let a cow beat me 
that way!" 

"But Jonathan, it's half-past nine!" 

"What of it? I'll just work her slowly — 



THE FARM SUNDAY 73 

she's quiet now, you see, and the bars are 
open. There won't be any trouble." 

"Oh, I wish you wouldn't," I said. But, 
seeing he was firm, "Well, if you will go, I'll 
harness." 

Jonathan looked at me ruefully. "That's 
too bad — you're all dressed." He wavered, 
but I would take no concessions based on 
feminine equipment. "Oh, that does n't mat- 
ter. I'll get my big apron. First you start 
her out, and I '11 keep her from going towards 
the house or down to the mill." 

Jonathan sidled cautiously through the gate 
and around the grazing cow. Then, with a 
gentle and ingratiating "Hi there, Bossie!" 
he managed to turn her, still grazing, towards 
the road. While the grass held out she drifted 
along easily enough, but when she reached the 
dirt of the roadway she raised her head, flicked 
her tail, and gave a little hop with her hind 
quarters that seemed to me indicative of an 
unquiet spirit. But I stood firm and Jonathan 
was gently urgent, and we managed to start 
her on the right road once more. She was not, 
however, going as slowly as Jonathan had 
planned, and it was with some misgivings that 



74 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

I donned my apron and went in to harness 
Kit. I led her around to the carriage-house 
and put her into the buggy, and still he had 
not returned. I got out the lap robe, shook it, 
and folded it neatly on the back of the seat. 
No Jonathan! There was nothing more for 
me to do, so I took off my apron and climbed 
into the carriage to wait. The carriage-house 
was as cool a place as one could have found. 
Both its big sliding doors were pushed back, 
one opening out toward the front gate, the 
other, opposite, opening into the inner barn- 
yard. I sat and looked out over the rolling, 
sunny country and felt the breeze, warm, but 
fresh and sweet, and listened to the barn 
swallows in the barnyard behind me, and 
wondered, as I have wondered a thousand 
times, why in New England the outbuildings 
always have so much better views than the 
house. 

Ten o'clock! Where was Jonathan? The 
Morehouses drove past, then the Elkinses; 
they went to the Baptist. Ten minutes past! 
There went the O'Neils — they belonged to 
our church — and the Scrantons, and Billy 
Howard and his sister, driving fast as usual; 



THE FARM SUNDAY 75 

they were always late. Quarter-past ten! 
Well, we might as well give up church. I 
thought of unharnessing, but I was very com- 
fortable where I was, and Kit seemed con- 
tented as she stood looking out of the door. 
Hark! What was that.^^ It sounded like the 
beat of hoofs in the lane — the cattle would 
n't come up at this hour! I stood up to see 
past the inner barnyard and off down the 
lane. "What on earth!" I said to myself. 
For — yes — surely — that was the two- 
year-old Devon coming leisurely up the lane 
towards the yard. In a few moments Jona- 
than's head appeared, then his shoulders, then 
his entire dusty, discouraged self. Yes, some- 
how or other, they must have made the round 
trip. As this dawned upon me, I smiled, then 
I laughed, then I sat down and laughed again 
till I was weak and tearful. It was cruel, and 
by the time Jonathan had reached the car- 
riage-house and sunk down on its threshold I 
had recovered enough to be sorry for him. 
But I was unfortunate in my first remark. 
"Why, Jonathan," I gasped, "what have you 
been doing with that cow.^^" 

Jonathan mopped his forehead. "Having 



76 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

iced tea under the trees. Could n't you see that 
to look at me?" he replied, almost savagely. 

'' You poor thing ! I '11 make you some when 
we go in. But do tell me, how did you ever get 
around here again from the back of the farm 
that way .^" 

''Easy enough," said Jonathan. "I drove 
her along to the pasture in great shape, only 
we were going a little fast. She tried to dodge 
the bars, but I turned her in through them all 
right. But some idiot had left the bars down 
at the other end of the pasture — between 
that and the back lots, you know — and that 
blamed cow went for that opening, just as 
straight — " 

I began to shake again. "Oh, that brought 
you out by the huckleberry knoll, and the 
ledges! Why, she could go anywhere!" 

''She could, and she did," said Jonathan 
grimly. He leaned back against the doorpost, 
immersed in bitter reminiscence. "She — 
certainly — did. I chased her up the ledges 
and through the sumachs and down through 
the birches and across the swamp. Oh, we 
did the farm, the whole blamed farm. What 
time is it.^^" 



THE FARM SUNDAY 77 

"Half-past ten," I said gently; and added, 
"What are you going to do with her now?" 

His jaw set in a fashion I knew. 

"I'm going to put her in that lower past- 
ure." 

I saw it was useless to protest. Church was 
a vanished dream, but I began to fear that 
Sunday dinner was also doomed. "Do you 
want me to help.^^" I asked. 

"Oh, no," said Jonathan. "I'll put her in 
the barn till I can get a rope, and then I'll 
lead her." 

However, I did help get her into the barn. 
Then while he went for his rope I unhar- 
nessed. When he came back, he had changed 
into a flannel shirt and working trousers. He 
entered the barn and in a few moments 
emerged, pulling hard on the rope. Nothing 
happened. 

"Go around the other way," he called, 
" and take a stick, and poke that cow till she 
starts." 

I went in at the back door, slid between the 
stanchions into the cow stall, and gingerly 
poked at the animal's hind quarters and said, 
"Hi!" until at last, with a hunching of hips 



78 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

and tossing of head, she bounded out into the 
sunny barnyard. 

"She'll be all right now," said Jonathan. 

I watched them doubtfully, but they got 
through the bars and as far as the road with- 
out incident. At the road she suddenly 
balked. She twisted her horns and set her 
front legs. I hurried down from my post of 
observation in the carriage-house door, and 
said "Hi!" again. 

"That's no good," panted Jonathan; "get 
your stick again. Now, when I pull, you hit 
her behind, and she'll come. I guess she 
has n't been taught to lead yet." 

"If she has, she has apparently forgotten," 
I replied. "Now, then, you pull!" 

The creature moved on grudgingly, with 
curious and unlovely sidewise lunges and 
much brandishing of horns, where the rope 
was tied. 

" Hit her again, now ! " said Jonathan. "Oh, 
hit her ! Hit her harder ! She does n't feel 
that, ffi^her! There! Now, she's coming." 

Truly, she did come. But I am ashamed to 
think how I used that stick. As we progressed 
up the road, over the hill, and down to the 



THE FARM SUNDAY 79 

lower pasture, there kept repeating themselves 
over and over in my head the hnes : — 

*' The sergeant pushed and the corporal pulled. 
And the three they wagged along." 

But I did not quote these to Jonathan until 
afterwards. There was something else, too, 
that I did not quote until afterwards. This 
was the remark of a sailor uncle of mine: "A 
man never tackled a job yet that he did n't 
have to have a woman to hold on to the 
slack." 

So much for Sunday business. But it 
should not for a moment be supposed that 
Sunday is full of these incidents. It is only 
for a little while in the morning. After the 
church hour, about eleven o'clock or earlier, 
the farm settles down. The "critters" are 
all attended to, the chicks are stowed, the 
cat has disappeared, the hens have finished 
all their important business and are lying 
on their sides in their favorite dirt-holes en- 
joying their dust-baths, so still, yet so dis- 
heveled that I used to think they were dead, 
and poke them to see — with what cacklings 
and flutterings resulting may be imagined. 



80 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

I have often wished for the hen's ability to 
express indignation. 

Yes, the farm is at peace, and as we sit 
under the big maples it seems to be reproach- 
ing us — "See how quiet everything is! And 
you could n't even manage church ! " 

Other people seem to manage it very com- 
fortably and quite regularly. On Sunday 
morning our quiet little road, unfrequented 
even by the ubiquitous automobile, is gay 
with church-goers. "Gay" may seem the 
wrong word, but it is quite the right one. In 
the city church-going is rather a sober affair. 
People either walk or take cars. They wear a 
certain sort of clothes, known as "church 
clothes," which represent a sort of hedging 
compromise between their morning and their 
afternoon wear. They approach the church 
in decorous silence; as they emerge they ex- 
change subdued greetings, walk a block or 
two in little companies, then scatter to their 
homes and their Sunday dinners. 

But in the country everybody but the vil- 
lage people drives, and the roads are full of 
teams, — buggies, surreys, phaetons, — the 
carriages newly washed, the horses freshly 



THE FARM SUNDAY 81 

groomed, the occupants scrupulously dressed 
in the prettiest things they own — their 
** Sunday-go-to-meeting" ones, which means 
something quite different from "church 
clothes." As one nears the village there is 
some friendly rivalry between horses, there is 
the pleasure of "catching up" with neighbors' 
teams, or of being caught up with, and at the 
church door there is the business of alighting 
and hitching the horses, and then, if it is early, 
waiting about outside for the "last bell" 
before going in. 

Even in the church itself there is more free- 
dom and variety than in our city tabernacles. 
In these there are always the same memorial 
windows to look at, — except perhaps once 
in ten years when somebody dies and a new 
one goes in, — but in the country stained 
glass is more rare. In many it has not even 
gained place at all, and the panes of clear 
glass let in a glory of blueness and whiteness 
and greenness to rejoice the heart of the wor- 
shiper. In others, more ambitious, alas ! there 
is ground glass with tinted borders; but this is 
not very disturbing, especially when the 
sashes are set open aslant, and the ivy and 



82 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

Virginia creeper cluster just outside, in bright 
greens and dark, or cast their shifting shadows 
on the glass, a dainty tracery of gray on silver. 

And at the altar there are flowers — not 
florist flowers, contracted for by the year, but 
neighborhood flowers. There are Mrs. Cum- 
mings's peonies — she always has such beau- 
ties; and Mrs. Hiram Brown's roses — no- 
body else has any of just that shade of yellow; 
and Mary Lord's foxgloves and larkspur — 
what a wonder of yellow and white and blue ! 
Each in its season, the flowers are full of per- 
sonal significance. The choir, too, is made up 
of our friends. There is Hiram Brown, and 
Jennie Sewall, and young Mrs. Harris, back 
for three weeks to visit her mother, and little 
Sally Winter, a shy new recruit, very pink 
over her promotion. The singing is perhaps 
not as finished as that of a paid quartette, 
but it is full of life and sweetness, and it makes 
a direct human appeal that the other often 
misses. 

After the service people go out slowly, 
waiting for this friend and that, and in the 
vestibule and on the steps and in the church- 
yard they gather in groups. The men saunter 



THE FARM SUNDAY 83 

off to the sheds to get the horses, and the 
women chat while they wait. Then the 
teams come up, as many as the roadway will 
hold, and there is the bustle of departure, 
the taking of seats, the harsh grinding of 
wheels against the wagon body as the driver 
"cramps" to turn round, then good-byes, and 
one after another the teams start off, out into 
the open country for another week of quiet, 
busy farm life. 

Yes, church is distinctively a social affair, 
and very delightful, and when our cows and 
hens and calves and other "critters" do not 
prevent, we are glad to have our part in it all. 
When they do, we yet feel that we have a share 
in it simply through seeing "the folks" go by. 
It is a distinct pleasure to see our neighbors 
trundling along towards the village. And 
then, if luck has been against us and we can- 
not join them, it is a pleasure to lie in the 
grass and listen to the quiet. After the last 
church-goers have passed, the road is deserted 
for two hours, until they begin to return. The 
neighboring farms are quiet, the "folks" are 
away, or, if some of the men are at home, they 
are sitting on their doorsteps smoking. 



84 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

If there is no wind, or if it is in the right 
quarter, we can hear the church bells, faintly 
now, and now very clear; there is the First 
Church bell, and the Baptist; there is St. 
John's, on a higher note, and Trinity, a little 
lower. After a time even the bells cease, and 
there is no sound but the wind in the big 
maples and the bees as they drone among the 
flower heads. 

Sunday, at least Sunday on a Connecticut 
farm, has a distinct quality of its own. I can 
hardly say what it means to me — no one, I 
suppose, could say all that it means. To call 
it a day of rest does not individualize it 
enough. It has to be described not so much in 
terms of rest as of balance and height. I 
think of the week as a long, sweeping curve, 
like the curve of a swift, deep wave at sea, 
and Sunday is the crest, the moment of poise, 
before one is drawn down into the next great 
concave, then up again, to pause and look 
off, and it is Sunday once more. 

The weather does not matter. If it rains, 
you get one kind of pause and outlook — the 
intimate, indoor kind. If the sun shines, you 
get another kind — wide and bright. And 



THE FARM SUNDAY 85 

what you do does not matter so long as it is 
different from the week, and so long as it ex- 
presses and develops that peculiar Sunday 
quality of balance and height. I can imagine 
nothing drearier than seven days all alike, 
and seven more, and seven more! Sundays 
are the big beads on the chain. They need not 
be all of the same color, but there must be the 
big beads'to satisfy the eye and the finger-tip. 

And a New England Sunday always is 
different. Whatever changes may have come 
or may be coming elsewhere, in New England 
Sunday has its own atmosphere. Over the 
fields and woods and rocks there is a sense of 
poise between reminiscence and expectancy. 
The stir of the morning church-going bright- 
ens but does not mar this. It adds the human 
note — rather not a note, but a quiet chord of 
many tones. And after it comes a hush. The 
early afternoon of a New England Sunday is 
the most absolutely quiet thing imaginable. 
It is the precise middle of the wave crest, the 
moment when motion ceases. 

From that point time begins to stir again. 
Life resumes. There is a certain amount of 
desultory intercourse between farm and farm. 



86 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

If people are engaged, or mean to be, they 
drive out together; if they are married, they 
go home to ''his folks "or "her folks." Friends 
walk together, farmers saunter along the road 
or back on the farms to 'Hake a look" at 
things. Consciously or not, and usually not, 
there is a kind of synthesis taking place, a 
gathering together of the scattered threads 
of many interests, a vague sense of the whole- 
ness of life. 

At five o'clock the cows turn towards home, 
and graze their leisurely way along the barn- 
yard lanes. And with the cows come duties, — 
chore-time, — then the simple, cold supper, 
then the short, quiet evening, and off we 
swing into the night that sweeps us away 
from the crest down into the long, blind hol- 
low of the week. 



VII 

The Grooming of the Farm 

There is a story about an artist who espied 
a picturesque old man and wished to paint 
him. At the time appointed the model ar- 
rived — new-shaven, new-washed, freshly 
attired, with all the delicious and incommun- 
icable flavor of the years irretrievably lost! 
Doubtless there are many such stories; doubt- 
less the thing has happened many, many times. 
And I am sorrier for the artist now than I 
used to be, because it is happening to me. 

Only it is not an old man — it is the farm, 
the blessed old farm, unkempt, unshorn, out 
at the elbows. In spite of itself, in spite of me, 
in spite of everybody, the farm is being 
groomed. 

It is nobody's fault, of course. Like most 
hopelessly disastrous things, it has all been 
done with the best possible intentions, per- 
haps it has even been necessary^ but it is none 
the less deplorable. 



88 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

It began, I think, with the sheds. They had 
in ages past been added one after another by a 
method of almost unconscious accretion, as 
the chambered nautilus makes his shell. They 
looked as if they had been, not exactly built, 
but rather laid together in the desultory, pro- 
visional fashion of the farmer, and held by an 
occasional nail, or the natural adhesion of the 
boards themselves. They leaned confidingly 
against the great barn and settled comfort- 
ably among the bare faces of rock in the barn- 
yard, as if they had always been there, as, 
indeed, they had been there longer than any 
one now living can remember. Neither they 
nor the barn had ever been painted, and they 
had all weathered to a silver-gray — not the 
gray of any paint or stain ever made, but the 
gray that comes only to certain kinds of wood 
when it has lived out in the rain and the sun- 
shine for fifty, seventy, a hundred years. It is 
to an old building what white hair is to an old 
lady. And as not all white hair is beautiful, 
so not all gray buildings are beautiful. But 
these were beautiful. When it rained, they 
grew dark and every knot-hole showed. When 
the sun came out and baked them dry, they 



THE GROOMING OF THE FARM 89 

paled to silver, and the smooth, rain-worn 
grooves and hollows of the boards glistened 
like a rifle barrel. 

The sheds were, I am afraid, not very useful. 
One, they said, had been built to hold ploughs, 
another for turkeys, another for ducks. One, 
the only one that was hen-tight, we used for 
the incarceration of confirmed "setters," and 
it thus gained the title of * 'Durance Vile.'* 
The rest were nameless, the abode of cobwebs 
and rats and old grain-bags and stolen nests 
and surprise broods of chickens, who dropped 
through cracks between loose boards and had 
to be extracted by Jonathan with much diffi- 
culty. Perhaps it was this that set him against 
them. At all events, he decided that they 
must go. I protested faintly, trying to think 
of some really sensible argument. 

"But Durance Vile," I said. "We need 
that. Where shall we put the setters.'*" 

"No, we don't. That isn't the way to 
treat setters, anyway. They should be cooped 
and fed on meat." 

"I suppose you read that in one of those 
agricultural experiment station pamphlets," 
I said. 



90 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

Many things that I consider disasters on 
the farm can be traced to one or another of 
these little pamphlets, and when a new one 
arrives I regard it with resignation but with- 
out cordiahty. 

The sheds went, and I missed them. Pos- 
sibly the hens missed them too. They wan- 
dered thoughtfully about the barnyard, step- 
ping rather higher than usual, cocking their 
heads and regarding me with their red-rimmed 
eyes as if they were cluckfully conjuring up 
old associations. Did they remember Durance 
Yile? Perhaps, but probably not. For all 
their philosophic airs and their attitudinizing, 
I know nobody who thinks less than a hen, 
or, at all events, their thinking is contempla- 
tive rather than practical. 

Jonathan also surveyed the raw spot. But 
Jonathan's mind is practical rather than 
contemplative. 

"Just the place for a carriage-house," he 
remarked. 

And the carriage-house was perpetrated. 
Perhaps a hundred years from now it will 
have been assimilated, but at present it 
stands out absolutely undigested in all its 



THE GROOMING OF THE FARM 91 

uncompromising newness of line and color. 
Its ridgepole, its roof edges, its corners, look 
as if they had been drawn with a ruler, where 
those of the old barn were sketched freehand. 
The barn and the sheds had settled into the 
landscape, the carriage-house cut into it. 

Even Jonathan saw it. "We '11 paint it the 
old-fashioned red to make it more in keeping," 
he said apologetically. 

But old-fashioned red is apparently not to 
be had in new-fashioned cans. And the farm 
remained implacable: it refused to digest the 
carriage-house. I felt rather proud of the 
farm for being so firm. 

The next blow was a heavy one. In the 
middle of the cowyard there was a wonderful 
gray rock, shoulder high, with a flat top and 
three sides abrupt, the other sloping. I used 
to sit on this rock and feed the hens and watch 
the "critters" come into the yard at milking- 
time. I like "critters," but when there are 
more than two or three in the yard, including 
some irresponsible calves, I like to have some 
vantage-point from which to view them — 
and be viewed. Our cattle are always gentle, 
but some of them are, to use a colloquial word 



92 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

that seems to me richly descriptive, so 
"nose-y." 

Of course a rock Hke this did not belong in 
a well-planned barnyard. Nowhere, except 
in New England, or perhaps in Switzerland, 
would one occur. But in our part of New 
England they occur so thickly that they are 
hard to dodge, even in building a house. I 
remember an entry in an old ledger discov- 
ered in the attic: "To blasten rocks in my 
soUor — £0 3 6." 

Without doubt the rock was in the way. 
Jonathan used to speak about it in ungentle 
terms every time he drove in and turned 
around. But this gave me no anxiety, because 
I felt sure that it had survived much stronger 
language than his. I did not think about 
dynamite. Probably when the Psalmist 
wrote about the eternal hills he did not think 
about dynamite either. 

And dynamite did the deed. It broke my 
pretty rock into little pieces as one might 
break up a chunk of maple sugar with a pair 
of scissors. It made a beautiful barnyard, but 
I missed my refuge, my stronghold. 

But this was only the beginning. Back of 



THE GROOMING OF THE FARM 93 

the barns lay the farm itself — scores of 
acres, chiefly rocks and huckleberry bushes, 
with thistles and mullein and sumac. There 
were dry, warm slopes, where the birches 
grew; not the queenly paper birch of the 
North, but the girlish little gray birch with its 
veil of twinkling leaves and its glimmer of 
slender stems. There were rugged ledges, 
deep-shadowed with oak and chestnut; there 
were hot, open hillsides thick-set with cat- 
brier and blackberry canes, where one could 
never go without setting a brown rabbit 
scampering. It was a delectable farm, but 
not, in the ordinary sense, highly productive, 
and its appeal was rather to the contempla- 
tive than to the practical mind. 

Jonathan was from the first infected with 
the desire of making the farm more productive 
— in the ordinary sense; and one day, when I 
wandered up to a distant corner, oh, dismay ! 
There was a slope of twinkling birches — 
no longer twinkling — prone! Cut, dragged, 
and piled up in masses of white stems and 
limp green leafage and tangled red-brown 
twigs ! It was a sorry sight. I walked about 
it much, perhaps, as my white hens had walked 



94 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

about the barnyard, and to as little purpose. 
For the contemplative mind is no match for 
the practical. I knew this, yet I could not 
forbear saying, later: — 

"Jonathan, I was up near the long meadow 
to-day." 

"Wereyou.?^" 

"O Jonathan! Those birches!" 

"What about them.^" 

"All cut!" 

"Oh, yes. We need that piece for pastur- 
age. 

"Oh, dear! We might as well not have a 
farm if we cut down all the birches." 

"We might as well not have a farm if we 
don't cut them down. They'll run us out in 
no time." 

"They don't look as if they would run any- 
body out — the dears ! " 

"Why, I did n't know you felt that way 
about them. We '11 let that other patch stand, 
if you like." 

"7/1 like!" 

I saved the birches, but other things kept 
happening. I went out one day and found one 
of our prettiest fence lines reduced to bare 



THE GROOMING OF THE FARM 95 

bones, all its bushes and vines — clematis, 
elderberry, wild cherry, sweet-fern, bitter- 
sweet — all cut, hacked, torn away. It looked 
like a collie dog in the summer when his long 
yellow fur has been sheared off. And, another 
day, it was a company of red lilies escaped 
along a bank above the roadside. There 
were weeds mixed in, to be sure, and some 
bushes, a delightful tangle — and all snipped, 
shaved to the skin ! 

When I spoke about it, Jonathan said: 
"I'm sorry. I suppose Hiram was just mak- 
ing the place shipshape." 

"Shipshape! This farm shipshape! You 
could no more make this farm shipshape than 
you could make a woodchuck look as though 
he had been groomed. The farm is n't a ship." 

"I hope it is n't a woodchuck, either," said 
Jonathan. 

During the haying season there was always 
a lull. The hand of the destroyer was stayed. 
Rather, every one was so busy cutting the hay 
that there was no time to cut anything else. 
One day in early August I took a pail and 
sauntered up the lane in the peaceful mood of 
the berry-picker — a state of mind as satis- 



96 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

factory as any I know. One is conscious of 
being useful — for what more useful than the 
accumulating of berries for pies? One has 
suitable ideals — the ideal of a happy home, 
since in attaining a happy home berry pies are 
demonstrably helpful. And one is also having 
a beautiful time. On my way I turned down 
the side lane to see how the blackberries were 
coming on. There lay my blackberry canes — 
lay, not stood — their long stems thick-set 
with fruit just turning from light red to dark. 
I do not love blackberries as I do birches; it 
was rather the practical than the contempla- 
tive part of me that protested that time, but it 
was with a lagging step that I went on, over 
the hill, to the berry patches. There another 
shock awaited me. Where I expected to see 
green clumps of low huckleberries there were 
great blotches of black earth and gray ashy 
stems, and in the midst a heap of brush still 
sending up idle streamers and puffs of blue 
smoke. Desolation of desolations ! That they 
should do this thing to a harmless berry 
patch ! 

They were not all burned. Only the heart 
of the patch had been taken, and after the 



THE GROOMING OF THE FARM 97 

first shock I explored the edges to see what 
was left, but with no courage for picking. I 
came home with an empty pail and a mind 
severe. 

"Jonathan," I said that night, "I thought 
you liked pies.^^" 

"I do," he said expectantly. 

"Well, what do you like in them.?" 

"Berries, preferably." 

"Oh, I thought perhaps you preferred 
cinders or dried briers." 

Jonathan looked up inquiringly, then a 
light broke. "Oh, you mean those blackberry 
bushes. Did n't I tell you about that.? That 
was a mistake." 

"So I thought," I said, unappeased. 

"I mean, I did n't mean them to be cut. It 
was that fool hobo I gave work to last week. 
I told him to cut the brush in the lane. Idiot ! 
I thought he knew a blackberry bush ! " 

"With the fruit on it, too," I added, re- 
lenting toward Jonathan a little. Then I 
stiffened again. "How about the huckleberry 
patch.? Was that a mistake, too.?" 

Jonathan looked guilty, but held himself 
as a man should. 



98 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"Why, no," he said; *'that is, Hiram 
thought we needed more ground to plough 
up next year, and that's as good a piece as 
there is — no big rocks or trees, you know. 
And we must have crops, you know." 

"Bless the rocks!" I burst out. "I wish 
there were more of them ! If it were n't for 
the rocks the farm would be all crops!" 

Jonathan laughed, then we both laughed. 

"You talk as though that would be a mis- 
fortune," he said. 

"It would be simply unendurable," I re- 
plied. 

"Jonathan," I added, "I am afraid you 
have not a proper subordination of values. 
I have heard of one farmer — just one — 
who had." 

"What is it.^ —and who was he.^" said 
Jonathan, submissively. 

I think he was relieved that the huckleberry 
question was not being followed up. 

"I believe he was your great-uncle by mar- 
riage. They say that there was a certain field 
that was full of butterfly-weed — you know, 
gorgeous orange stuff — " 

"I know," said he. "What about it.?" 



THE GROOMING OF THE FARM 99 

"Well, there was a meadow that was full of 
it, just in its glory when the grass was ready to 
cut. Jonathan, what would you have done ? " 

*'Go on," said Jonathan. 

"Well, he always mowed that field himself, 
and when he came to a clump of butterfly- 
weed, he always mowed around it." 

"Very pretty," said Jonathan, in an im- 
personal way. 

"And that," I added, "is what I call hav- 
ing a proper subordination of values." 

"I see," said he. 

"And now," I went on, with almost too 
ostentatious sweetness, "if you will tell me 
where to find a huckleberry patch that is not 
already reduced to cinders, I will go out to- 
morrow and get some for pies." 

Jonathan knew, and so did I, that there 
were still plenty of berry bushes left. Never- 
theless, he was moved. 

"Now, see here," he began seriously, "I 
don't want to spoil the farm for you. Only I 
don't know which things you like. If you'll 
just tell me the places you don't want touched, 
I'll speak to Hiram about them." 

"Really.?" I exclaimed. "Why, I'll tell 



100 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

you now, right away. There's the lane — 
you know, that must n't be touched; and the 
ledges — but you could n't do anything to 
those, of course, anyway." 

" No, even the hobo would n't tackle them," 
said Jonathan grimly. 

"And the birches, the ones that are left. 
You promised me those, you know. And the 
swamp, of course, and the cedar knoll where 
the high-bush blueberries grow, and then — 
oh, yes — that lovely hillside beyond the long 
meadow where the sumac is, and the dog- 
wood, and everything. And, of course, the 
rest of the huckleberries — " 

"The rest of the huckleberries!" said he. 
"That means all the farm. There is n't a spot 
as big as your hat where you can't show me 
some sort of a huckleberry bush." 

"So much the better," I said contentedly. 

"Oh, come now," he protested. "Be rea- 
sonable. Even your wonderful farmer that 
you tell about did a little mowing. He mowed 
around the butterfly- weed, but he mowed. 
You 're making the farm into solid butterfly- 
weed, and there'll be no mowing at all." 

"Why, Jonathan, I've left you the long 



THE GROOMING OF THE FARM 101 

meadow, and the corner meadow, and the 
hill orchard, and then there 's the ten-acre lot 
for corn and potatoes — only I wish you 
would n't plant potatoes." 

" What 's the matter with potatoes? " 

" Oh, I don't know. First, they are too neat 
and green, and then they are all covered with 
potato-bug powder, and then they wither up 
and lie all around, and then they are dug, and 
the field is a sight! Now, rye and corn! 
They're lovely from beginning to end." 

Jonathan ruminated. "I seem to see my- 
self expressing these ideas to Hiram," he re- 
marked dryly. 

"I suppose it all comes down to the simple 
question, What is the farm for.'^" I said. 

"I am afraid that is what Hiram would 
think," said Jonathan. 

"Never mind about Hiram," I said se- 
verely. "Now really, away down deep, have 
n't you yourself a sneaking desire for — oh, 
for crops, and for having things look ship- 
shape, as you call it.? Now, have n't you.?" 

"I wonder," said Jonathan, as though we 
were talking about a third person. 

"I don't wonder; I know. The trouble with 



102 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

men," I went on, "is that when they want to 
make a thing look well, all they can think of 
is cutting and chopping. Look at a man when 
he goes to a party, or to have his picture 
taken! He always dashes to the barber's 
first — that is, unless there 's a woman around 
to interfere. Do you remember Jack Mason 
when he was married .^^ Face and neck the 
color of raw beef from sunburn, and hair 
cropped so close it made his head look like a 
drab eggV' 

*'I did n't notice," said Jonathan. 

"No, I suppose not. You would have done 
the same thing — you're all alike. Look at 
horses ! When men want to make a horse look 
stylish, why, chop off his tail, of course ! And 
they are only beginning to learn better. When 
a man builds a house, what does he do.^ Cuts 
down every tree, every bush and twig, and 
makes it 'shipshape,' as you call it. And then 
the women have to come along and plant 
everything all over again." 

"But things need cutting now and then," 
said Jonathan. "You wouldn't like it, you 
know, if a man never went to the barber's. 
He'd look like a woodchuck." 



THE GROOMING OF THE FARM 103 

''There are worse-looking things than wood- 
chucks. Still, of course, there's a medium. 
Possibly the woodchuck carries neglect to 
excess." 

The discussion rested there. I do not know 
whether Jonathan expressed any of these 
ideas to Hiram, but the grooming process 
appeared to be temporarily suspended. Then 
one day my turn came. It was dusk, and I 
was sitting on an old log at the back of the 
orchard, looking out over the little swamp, all 
a-twinkle with fireflies. Jonathan had been 
up the lane, prowling about, as he often does 
at nightfall, "to take a look at the farm." I 
heard his step in the lane, and he jumped over 
the bars at the far end of the orchard. There 
was a pause, then a vehement exclamation — 
too vehement to print. Jonathan's remarks 
do not usually need editing, and I listened to 
these in the dusk in some degree of wonder, 
if not of positive enjoyment. 

Finally I called out, "What's the matter.?" 

"Oh! You there.?" He strode over. "Mat- 
ter! Come and see what that fool hobo did." 

"You called him something besides that a 
moment ago," I remarked. 



104 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"I hope so. Whatever I called him, he's it. 
Come over." 

He led me to the orchard edge, and there 
in the half light I saw a line of stubs and a 
pile of brush. 

"Not your quince bushes!" I gasped. 

"Just that," he said, grimly, and then 
burst into further unprintable phrases descrip- 
tive of the city-bred loafer. "If I ever give 
work to a hobo again, I'll be — " 

"Sh-h-h," I said; and I could not forbear 
adding, "Now you know how I have felt 
about those huckleberry bushes and birches 
and things, only I had n't the language to 
express it." 

"You have language enough," said Jona- 
than. 

Undoubtedly Jonathan was depressed. I 
had been depressed for some time on account 
of the grooming of my berry patches and 
fence lines, but now I found myself growing 
suddenly cheerful. I do not habitually batten 
on the sorrow of others, but this was a special 
case. For how could I be blind to the fact 
that chance had thrust a weapon into my 
hand? I knew that hereafter, at critical mo- 



THE GROOMING OF THE FARM 105 

ments, I need only murmur "quince bushes" 
and discussion would die out. It made me 
feel very gentle towards Jonathan, to be thus 
armed against him. Gentle, but also cheerful. 

"Jonathan," I said, "it's no use standing 
here. Come back to the log where I was sit- 
ting." 

He came, with heavy tread. We sat down, 
and looked out over the twinkling swamp. 
The hay had just been cut, and the air was 
richly fragrant. The hush of night encom- 
passed us, yet the darkness was full of life. 
Crickets chirruped steadily in the orchard 
behind us. From a distant meadow the purr- 
ing whistle of the whip-poor-will sounded in 
continuous cadence, like a monotonous and 
gentle lullaby. The woods beyond the open 
swamp, a shadowy blur against the sky, were 
still, except for a sleepy note now and then 
from some bird half-awakened. Once a wood 
thrush sang his daytime song all through, ^nd 
murmured part of it a second time, then sink 
into silence. 

"Jonathan," I said at last, "the farm is 
rather a good place to be." 

"Not bad." 



106 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"Let's not groom it too much. Let's not 
make it too shipshape. After all, you know, 
it is n't really a ship." 

"Nor yet a woodchuck, I hope," said 
Jonathan. 

And I was content not to press the matter. 



VIII 

*' Escaped from Old Gardens" 

In the days when I deemed it necessary to 
hunt down in my well-thumbed Gray every 
flower of wood and field, and fit it to its Latin 
name, I used often to meet this phrase. At 
first, being young, I resented it. I scorned 
gardens: their carefully planned and duly 
tended splendors were not for me. The orchid 
in the deep woods or by the edge of the lonely 
swamp, the rare and long-sought heather in 
the open moorland, these it was that roused 
my ardor. And to find that some newly dis- 
covered flower was not a wild flower at all, 
but merely a garden flower "escaped"! The 
very word carried a hint of reprobation. 

But as the years went on, the phrase gath- 
ered to itself meanings vague and subtle. I 
found myself welcoming it and regarding with 
a warmer interest the flower so described. 
From what old garden had it come.^ What 
associations and memories did it bring out 



108 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

of the past? Had the paths where it grew 
been obKterated by the encroachments of a 
ruthless civiHzation, or had the tide of human 
life drawn away from it and left it to be en- 
gulfed by the forest from which it had once 
been wrested, with nothing left to mark it 
but a gnarled old lilac tree? I have chanced 
upon such spots in the heart of the wood, 
where the lilac and the apple tree and the old 
stoned cellar wall are all that are left to test- 
ify to the human life that once centred there. 
Or had the garden from which its seed was 
blown only fallen into a quiet decay, deserted 
but not destroyed, left to bloom unchecked 
and untended, and fling its seeds to the sum- 
mer winds that its flowers might *' escape" 
whither they would? 

Lately, I chanced upon such a garden. I 
was walking along a quiet roadside, almost 
dusky beneath the shade of close-set giant 
maples, when an unexpected fragrance 
breathed upon me. I lingered, wondering. It 
came again, in a warm wave of the August 
breeze. I looked up at the tangled bank beside 
me — surely, there was a spray of box peep- 
ing out through the tall weeds ! There was a 



"ESCAPED FROM OLD GARDENS" 109 

bush of it — another ! Ah ! it was a heds-e, a 
box hedge! Here were the great stone steps 
leading up to the gate, and here the old, square 
capped fence-posts, once trim and white, now 
sunken and silver-gray. The rest of the fence 
was lying among the grasses and goldenrod, 
but the box still lived, dead at the top, its leaf- 
less branches matted into a hoary gray tangle, 
but springing up from below in crisp green 
sprays, lustrous and fragrant as ever, and 
richly suggestive of the past that produced it. 
For the box implies not merely human life, 
but human life on a certain scale: leisurely, 
decorous, well-considered. It implies faith in 
an established order and an assured future. A 
beautiful box hedge is not planned for im- 
mediate enjoyment; it is built up inch by 
inch through the years, a legacy to one's heirs. 
Beside the gate-posts stood what must once 
have been two pillars of box. As I passed be- 
tween them my feet felt beneath the matted 
weeds of many seasons the broad stones of the 
old flagged walk that led up through the gar- 
den to the house. Following it, I found, not 
the house, but the wide stone blocks of the old 
doorsteps, and beyond these, a ruin — gray 



110 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

ashes and blackened brick, two great heaps 
of stone where the chimneys had been, with 
the stone slabs that lined the fireplaces fallen 
together. At one end was the deep stone cellar 
filled now with young beeches as tall as the 
house once was. Just outside stood two 
cherry trees close to the old house wall — so 
close that they had burned with it and now 
stood, black and bare and gaunt, in silent 
comradeship. At the other end I almost 
stumbled into the old well, dark and still, with 
a glimmer of sky at the bottom. 

But I did not like the ruin, nor the black 
well lurking in the weeds and ashes. The gar- 
den was better, and I went back to it and fol- 
lowed the stone path as it turned past the 
end of the house and led, under another 
broad hedge of box now choked by lusty 
young maples, to the old rose-garden. Beyond 
were giant lilacs, and groups of waxberry 
bushes covered with the pretty white balls 
that children love to string; there was the old- 
fashioned *' burning-bush," already preparing 
its queer, angled berries for autumn splendors. 
And among these, still holding their own in 
the tangle, clumps of the tall, rose-lilac phloxes 



"ESCAPED FROM OLD GARDENS" 111 

that the old people seem specially to have 
loved, swayed in the light breeze and filled 
the place with their heavy, languorous fra- 
grance. 

Truly, it is a lovely spot, my old garden, 
lovelier, perhaps, than when it was in its 
golden prime, when its hedges were faultlessly 
trimmed and its walks were edged with neat 
flower borders, when their smooth flagging- 
stones showed never a weed, and even the 
little heaps of earth piled up, grain by grain, 
by the industrious ants, were swept away each 
morning by the industrious broom. Then 
human life centred here; now it is very far 
away. All the sounds of the outside world 
come faintly to this place and take on its 
quality of quiet, — the lowing of cows in the 
pastures, the shouts of men in the fields, the 
deep, vibrant note of the railroad train which 
goes singing across distances where its rattle 
and roar fail to penetrate. It is very still here. 
Even the birds are quieter, and the crickets 
and the katydids less boisterous. The red 
squirrels move warily through the tree-tops 
with almost a chastened air, the black-and- 
gold butterflies flutter indolently about the 



112 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

heads of the phlox, a hummingbird, flashing 
green, hovers about some belated blossom- 
heads of the scarlet bee-balm, and then, as if 
to point the stillness, alights on an apple twig, 
looking, when at rest, so very small! Only 
the cicada, as he rustles clumsily about with 
his paper wings against the flaking bark and 
yellowing leaves of an old apple tree, seems 
unmindful of the spell of silence that holds 
the place. 

And the garden is mine now — mine be- 
cause I have found it, and every one else, as I 
like to believe, has forgotten it. Next it is a 
grove of big old trees. Would they not have 
been cut down years ago if any one had re- 
membered them.f^ And on the other side is a 
meadow whose thick grass, waist-high, ought 
to have been mowed last June and gathered 
into some dusky, fragrant barn. But it is for- 
gotten, like the garden, and will go leisurely 
to seed out there in the sun; the autumn 
winds will sweep it and the winter snow will 
mat down its dried tangle. 

Forgotten — and as I lie in the long grass, 
drowsy with the scent of the hedge and the 
phlox, I seem only a memory myself. If I 



"ESCAPED FROM OLD GARDENS" 113 

stay too long I shall forget to go away, and 
no one will remember to find me. In truth, I 
feel not unwilling that it should be so. Could 
there be a better place .^ "Escaped from old 
gardens"! Ah, foolish, foolish flowers! If I 
had the happiness to be born in an old garden, 
I would not escape. I would stay there, and 
dream there, forever! 



IX 

The Country Road 

On a June day, years ago, I was walking 
along our country road. At the top of a steep 
little hill I paused to rest and let my eyes lux- 
uriate in the billowing greens and tender blues 
of the valley below. While I stood there my 
neighbor came slowly up from the garden, 
her apron over her head, a basket of green 
peas on her arm. 

"What a view you have up here on your 
hill!" I said. 

She drew back her apron and turned to look 
oflF. "Yes," she said indulgently; "ye-e-s." 
Then her face brightened and she turned to 
me with real animation: "But it's better in 
winter when the leaves is off, 'n' you c'n see 
the passin' on the lower road." 

Fresh from the city as I was, with all its 
prejudices and intolerance upon me, I was 
partly amused, partly irritated, by her answer. 
So all this glory of greenness, all this wonder of 



THE COUNTRY ROAD 115 

the June woodland, was merely tolerated, 
while the baffled observer waited for the 
leaves to be "off"! And all for the sake of 
seeing — what? A few lumber wagons, for- 
sooth, loaded with ties for the railway, a few 
cows driven along morning and evening, a few 
children trudging to and from school, the 
postman's buggy on its daily rounds, twice a 
week the meat cart, once a week the grocery 
wagon, once a month the "tea-man," and 
now and then a neighbor's team on its way to 
the feed-store or the blacksmith's shop down 
at "the Corners." 

For this, then, — not for the beauty of the 
winter landscape, but for this poor procession 
of wayfarers, my neighbors waited with im- 
patience. If I could, I would have snatched 
up their view bodily and carried it off with me, 
back to my own farm for my own particular 
delectation. It should never again have 
shoved itself in their way. 

But since that time I have lived longer in 
the country. If I have not made it my home 
for all twelve months, I have dwelt in it from 
early April to mid-December, and now, when I 
think of my neighbor's remark, it is with grow- 



116 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

ing comprehension. I realize that I, in my 
patronizing one-sidedness, was quite wrong. 

City folk go to the country, as they say, to 
"get away" — justifiable enough, perhaps, 
or perhaps not. They seek spots remote from 
the centres; they choose deserted districts, 
untraveled roads; they criticize their ances- 
tors unmercifully for their custom of building 
houses close to the road and keeping the front 
dooryard clear of shrubbery. But they who 
built those homes which are our summer 
refuge did not want to get away; they wanted 
to get together. The country was not their 
respite, it was their life, and the road was to 
them the emblem of race solidarity — nay, 
more than the emblem, it was the means to 
it. This is still the case with the country peo- 
ple, and as I live among them I am coming to 
a realization of the meaning of the Road. 

In the city one can never get just this. 
There are streets, of course, but by their very 
multiplicity and complexity they lose their 
individual impressiveness and are merged in 
that great whole, the City. One recoils from 
them and takes refuge in the sense of one's 
own home. 



THE COUNTRY ROAD 117 

But in the country there is just the Road. 
Recoil from it? One's heart goes out to it. 
The road is a part of home, the part that 
reaches out to our friends and draws them to 
us or brings us to them. It is our outdoor 
clubhouse, it is the avenue of the Expected 
and the Unexpected, it is the Home Road. 

In a sense it does no more for us, and in 
some ways much less, than our city streets do. 
Along these, too, our tradesmen's carts come 
to our doors, along these our friends must fare 
as they arrive or depart; we seek the streets 
at our outgoings and our incomings. But they 
are, after all, strictly a means. We use them, 
but when we enter our homes we forget them, 
or try to. Our individual share in the street 
is not large. So much goes on and goes by 
that has only the most general bearing on our 
interests that we cease to give it our attention 
at all. It is not good form to watch the street, 
because it is not worth while. When children's 
voices fly in at our windows, we assume that 
they are other people's children, and they 
usually are. When we hear teams, we expect 
them to go by, and they usually do. When we 
hear a cab door slam, we take it for granted 



118 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

that it IS before some other house, and usually 
it is. And if, having nothing better to do, we 
perchance walk to the window and glance out 
between the curtains, we are repaid by seeing 
nothing interesting and by feeling a little 
shamefaced besides. 

Not so in the country. What happens 
along the Road is usually our intimate con- 
cern. Most of those who go by on it are our 
own acquaintances and neighbors, and are 
interesting as such. The rest are strangers, 
and interesting as such. For it is the rarity 
of the stranger that gives him his piquancy. 

And so in the country it is both good form 
and worth while to watch the Road — to 
"keep an eye out," as they say. When Jona- 
than and I first came to the farm, we were 
incased in a hard incrustation of city ways. 
When teams passed, we did not look up; when 
a wagon rattled, we did not know whose it 
was, and we said we did not care. When one 
of our neighbors remarked, casually, "Heard 
Bill Smith's team go by at half-past eleven 
last night. Wonder if the's anythin' wrong 
down his way," we stared at one another in 
amazement, and wondered, "Now, how in the 



THE COUNTRY ROAD 119 

world did he know it was Bill Smith's team?" 
We smiled over the story of a postmistress 
who had the ill luck to be selling stamps when 
a carriage passed. She hastily shoved them 
out, and ran to the side window — too late ! 
"Sakes!" she sighed; *' that's the second I've 
missed to-day!" We smiled, but I know now 
that if I had been in that postmistress's place 
I should have felt exactly as she did. 

When we began to realize the change in 
ourselves, we were at first rather sheepish and 
apologetic about it. We fell into the way of 
sitting where we could naturally glance out 
of the windows, but we did this casually, as if 
by chance, and said nothing about it. When 
August came, and dusk fell early and lamps 
were lighted at supper-time, I drew down the 
shades. 

But one night Jonathan said, carelessly, 
Why do you pull them all the way down.^" 
Why not.^" I asked, with perhaps just a 
suspicion. 

"Oh," he said, "it always seems so cheer- 
ful from the road to look in at a lighted 
window." 

I left them up, but I noticed that Jonathan 



(6 



120 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

kept a careful eye on the shadowy road out- 
side. Was he trying to cheer it by pleasant 
looks, I wondered, or was he just trying to 
see all that went by? 

Jonathan's seat is not so good as mine for 
observation. A big deutzia bush looms between 
his window and the road, while at my window 
only the tips of a waxberry bush obscure the 
view, and there is a door beside me. Therefore 
Jonathan was distinctly at a disadvantage. 
He offered to change seats, suggesting that 
there was a draft where I was, and that the 
light was bad for my eyes, but I found that I 
did not mind either of these things. 

One day a team passed while Jonathan was 
carving. He looked up too late, hesitated, 
then said, rather consciously : " Who was that? 
Did you see?" 

"7 don't know," I said, with a far-away, 
impersonal air, as though the matter had 
no interest for me. But I had n't the heart 
to keep up the pose, and I added : " Perhaps 
you'll know. It was a white horse, and a 
business wagon with red wheels, and the man 
wore a soft felt hat, and there was a dog on 
the seat beside him.". 



THE COUNTRY ROAD 121 

Before I had finished, Jonathan was grin- 
ning delightedly. "Suppose we shake these 
city ways," he said. He deliberately got up, 
raised the shades, pushed back a curtain, and 
moved a jug of goldenrod. "There! Can you 
see better now.^" he asked. 

And I said cheerfully, "Yes, quite a good 
deal better. And after this, Jonathan, when 
you hear a team coming, why don't you stop 
carving till it goes by.^^" 

"I will," said Jonathan. 

It was our final capitulation, and since 
then we have been much more comfortable. 
We run to the window whenever we feel in- 
clined, and we leave our shades up at dusk 
without apology or circumlocution. We are 
coming to know our neighbors' teams by 
their sound, and we are proud of it. Why, in- 
deed, should we be ashamed of this human 
interest .f^ Why should we be elated that we 
can recognize a bluebird by his flight, and 
ashamed of knowing our neighbor's old bay 
by his gait? Why should we boast of our 
power to recognize the least murmur of the 
deceptive grosbeak, and not take pride in 
being able to "spot" Bill Smith's team by the 



im] THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

peculiar rattle of its board bottom as it 
crosses the bridge by the mill? Is he not of 
more value than many grosbeaks? But how 
can we love om* neighbor if we do not pay 
some attention to him — him and his horse 
and his cart and all that is his? And how shall 
we pay attention to him if we neglect the 
opportunities of the Road, since for the rest 
he is busy and we are busy, and we belong 
each to our own farm? 

I stopped at a friendly door one day to ask, 
"Have Phil and Jimmy gone by? I wanted 
to see them." 

"No, I have n't seen them." The bright- 
faced little lady stood in the doorway glanc- 
ing over my shoulder out toward the sunny 
road. "Have you seem them to-day, Nellie? " 
she called into the dusky sitting-room. " No," 
she turned back to me, "we have n't seen 
them. And," she added, with gay directness, 
"nobody could get by the house without our 
seeing them; I'm sure of that!" 

Her remark pleased me immensely. I like 
this frank interest in the Road very much. 
When I am at home, I have it myself, and I 
have stopped being ashamed of it. When I 



THE COUNTRY ROAD 123 

am on the Road, I like to know that I am an 
object of interest to the dwellers in the houses 
I pass. I look up at the windows, whose tiny 
panes reflect the brightness of outdoors and 
tell me nothing of the life within, and I like to 
think that some one behind them knows that 
I am going by. Often there is some sign of 
recognition — a motion of the hand through 
a parted curtain, or rarely a smiling face; now 
and then some one looks out from a doorway 
to send a greeting, or glances up from the gar- 
den or the well ; but even without these tokens 
I still have the sense of being noticed, and I 
find it pleasant and companionable. In the 
city, when I go to see a friend, I approach a 
house that gives no sign. I mount to a non- 
committal vestibule and push an impersonal 
button, and after the other necessary prelim- 
inaries I find my friends. In the country as I 
drive up to the house I notice curtains stir- 
ring, I hear voices, and before I have had 
time to get out and find the hitch-rope every 
person in the house is either at the gate or 
standing in the doorway. Our visit is begun 
before we have left the Road, the hospitable, 
social Road. Such ways would probably not 



124 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

do for the city. So much the worse for the 
city. The country ways are best. 

Everything that happens along the Road 
has the social touch. In the city, orders are 
given by telephone, and when the delivery 
wagon comes, it sweeps up with a rush, the 
boy seizes a basket and jumps out, runs to 
the back door, shouts the name of the owner, 
slams down his goods, and dashes back to the 
wagon, with a crisp '*Git-up!" to the well- 
trained horse, who starts forward while his 
driver is still mounting to his seat. 

Not so in the country. The wagon draws 
peacefully out to the side of the Road, and 
the horse falls to nibbling grass if he is un- 
checked, or to browsing on my rosebushes if 
he is not. If it is the grocer's wagon, the boy 
comes around to the back porch and we dis- 
cuss what supplies will probably be needed by 
the time of his next visit. Incidentally, we talk 
about weather and crops and woodchucks 
and trout, or bass or partridges, according to 
the season. If it is the meat cart or the fish 
wagon, I seize a platter and go out, the back 
flap of the cart is lifted up, I step under its 
shade and peer in, considering what is oflFered 



THE COUNTRY ROAD 125 

me and deciding what I will have plucked out 
for me to carry back to the house. 

Besides the routine visitors, there are 
others — peddlers with wonderful collections 
of things to sell (whole clothing shops or furn- 
iture stores some of them bring with them), 
peddlers with books, peddlers with silver, 
peddlers with jewelry. In the course of a few 
months one is offered everything from shoe- 
strings to stoves. There are men who want 
to buy, too, — buyers of old iron, of old rags, 
of old rubber. "Anny-ting, anny-ting vat 
you vill sell me, madame, I vill buy it," said 
one, with outspread hands. 

Cattle go by, great droves of them, being 
driven along the Road and sold from farm to 
farm until all are gone. I love the day that 
brings them. A dust haze down the Road, 
the mooing of cows and the baaing of calves, 
the shouts of the drovers, the sound of many 
hoofs, and the cattle are here. The farmer 
and the "hired man" leave their work and 
saunter out to the Road to "look 'em over," 
the children come running out to watch the 
pretty creatures, sleek or tousled, soft-eyed or 
wild-eyed, yearlings with bits of horns, stocky 



126 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

two-year-olds, and wabbly-legged youngsters 
hardly able to keep pace with the rest, all of 
them glad enough of the chance to pause in 
the shade and nibble at the rich, cool grass. 
One or two of the "critters" are approved of, 
perhaps, and bought, and the rest move on, 
the sunny dust haze rises and clears, the 
shouts of the drovers grow faint, and the 
Road is still again. 

Men go by looking for work; they will clean 
your well for you, they will file your horses' 
teeth for you, they will mend your umbrellas 
and repair your clocks and sharpen your scis- 
sors. In the city, when we hear the scissors- 
grinder ding-ding-dinging along the street, 
we wonder in an impersonal way how he 
makes a living; but in the country we espy 
him from afar and are out at the gate to meet 
him, with all the scissors and knives in the 
house. 

There are tramps, too, of course. Not the 
kind one finds near cities, or in crowded 
summer watering-places. Our Road does not 
lead to Rome, at least not very directly, and 
the tramp who chooses it is sure to be a mild 
and unenterprising creature, a desultory 



THE COUNTRY ROAD 127 

tramp who does not really know his business. 
Some of the same ones come back year after 
year, and, in defiance of modem sociological 
science, we offer them the hospitality of the 
back porch with sandwiches and coffee, while 
we exchange the commonplaces of the season. 
It is the custom of the Road. 

And so the procession of the Road moves 
on. If we wait long enough — and it is not 
so long either — everything goes by: gay 
wedding parties, christening parties, slow 
funerals, the Road bears them all; and to 
those who live beside it nothing is alien, no- 
thing indifferent. Throughout the week the 
daytime is for business — remembering al- 
ways that on the country Road business is 
never merely business, but always sociability 
too; the early evening is for pleasure; the 
night is for rest, for that stillness that cities 
never know, broken only when human neces- 
sity most sharply importunes, in the crises of 
birth, of death. On Sundays all the world 
drives to church, or sits on its doorstep and 
watches the rest. And Sunday and week 
days alike, every one's interest goes out to the 
Road. 



128 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

I venture to say that when we think of our 
city homes we think of their interiors, but 
when we think of our farmhouse homes we 
think of the Road as well. They are like little 
islands in a river, — one remembers them 
together. For the Road is a river — a river of 
life. Most of our words about roads imply 
motion. A road comes, we say, and it goes, it 
sweeps, it curves, it climbs, it descends, it 
rises and drops, it bends and turns. And, in 
fact, it means movement, it is always bringing 
life and taking it again, or if for a time it does 
neither, it is always inviting, always promis- 
ing. We have all felt it. As we are whirled 
along in a railway train even, the thing that 
stirs our imagination is the roads, the paths. 
I can still remember glimpses of these that I 
had years ago — a footpath over a rounded 
hilltop through long yellow grass, a rough 
logging-road beside a foaming mountain 
river, a brushy wood road leading through 
bars into deep shade, a country road at dusk, 
curving past a low farmhouse with lights in 
the windows. I could never follow these 
roads, but I remember them still, and still 
they allure me. 



THE COUNTRY ROAD 129 

Our Road, as it flows placidly past our 
farm, suggests nothing very exciting or spec- 
tacular. It is a pretty bit of road, rounding a 
rocky corner of the farm and leading past the 
old house under cool depths of maple shade, 
out again into a broad space of sunlight, 
dropping over a little hill, around a curve, and 
out of sight. I know it well, of course, every 
rock and flower of it, but its final appeal to 
me is not through its beauty, it is not even 
through my sense of ownership in it; it is 
simply that it is a Road — a road that leads 
out of Everywhere into Everywhere Else, a 
road that goes on. About a road that ends 
there is no glamour. It may be pretty or use- 
ful, but as a road it is a failure. For the Road 
is the symbol of endless possibility. From the 
faintest footpath across a meadow, where as a 
child one has always felt that some elf or 
gnome may appear, or along which, if one 
were to wander with sufficient negligence, one 
might be led into the realm of " faerie " to the 
broad turnpike which fares through open 
country, plunges through the surging cities, 
and escapes to broad lands beyond — any 
path, any road, makes this appeal. And so 



130 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

long as one has faith that what may be is 
more than what is, so long as one has the 
buoyant patience to await it or the will to go 
forth and seek it, so long as one has the im- 
agination and the heart of the wayfarer, 
the charm of the Road will be potent. 



X 

The Lure of the Berry 

Men have sung the praises of fishing and 
hunting, they have extolled the joys of boat- 
ing and riding, they have dwelt at length 
upon the pleasures of automobiling. But 
there is one — sport, shall I call it? — which 
no one seems to have thought worth mention- 
ing : the gentle sport of berrying. 

Perhaps calling it a sport is an unfortunate 
beginning; it gives us too much to live up to. 
No, it is not a sport, though I can't think why, 
since it is quite as active as drop-line fishing. 
Perhaps the trouble is with the game — the 
fish are more active than the berries, and 
their excesses cover the deficiencies of the 
stolid figure in the boat. 

What, then, shall we call it.^^ Not an oc- 
cupation; it is too desultory for that; nor an 
amusement, because of a certain tradition of 
usefulness that hangs about it. Probably it 
belongs in that small but select group of 



132 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

things that people do ostensibly because they 
are useful but really because they are fun. 
At any rate, it does not matter how we class 
it, — it is just berrying. 

But not strawberrying. Strawberries are 
so far down, and so few! They cannot be 
picked with comfort by any one over six years 
old. 

Nor blackberrying ! Blackberries are good 
when gathered in, but in the gathering pro- 
cess there is nothing restful or soothing. They 
always grow in hot places, and the briers 
make you cross; they pull your hair and 
** sprout " your clothes and scratch your wrists. 
And the berries stain your fingers dark blue, 
and, moreover, they are frequented by those 
unpleasant little triangular, greenish-brown 
creatures known as squash bugs, which I do 
not believe even the Ancient Mariner could 
have been called upon to love. No, I do not 
mean blackberrying. 

What then.^ What indeed but huckleberry- 
ing ! How can I adequately sing the praises of 
the gentle, the neat, the comfortable huckle- 
berry! No briers, no squash bugs, no back- 
breaking stoop or arm-rending stretch to 



THE LURE OF THE BERRY 133 

reach them. Just a big, bushy, green clump, 
full of glossy black or softly blue berries, and 
you can sit right down on the tussocks among 
them, put your pail underneath a bush, and 
begin. At first, the handfuls drop in with a 
high-keyed "plinking" sound; then, when the 
"bottom is covered," this changes to a soft 
patter altogether satisfactory; and as you sit 
stripping the crisp branches and letting the 
neat little balls roll through your fingers, your 
spirit grows calm within you, you feel the 
breeze, you look up now and then over 
stretches of hill, or pasture, or sky, and you 
settle into a state of complete acquiescence 
in things as they are. 

For there is always a breeze, and always a 
view, at least where my huckleberries grow. 
If any one should ask me where to find a good 
situation for a house, I should answer, with a 
comprehensive wave of my arm, "Oh, choose 
any huckleberry patch." Only 't were pity to 
demolish so excellent a thing as a huckleberry 
patch, merely to erect so doubtful a thing as a 
house. 

I know one such — a royal one even among 
huckleberry patches. To get to it you go up 



134 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

an old road, — up, and up, and up, — you 
pass big fields, newmown and wide open to 
the sky, you get broader and broader outlooks 
over green woodland and blue rolling hills, 
with a bit of azure river in the midst. You 
come out on great flats of rock, thinly edged 
with light turf, and there before you are the 
"berry lots," as the natives call them, — 
rolling, windy uplands, with nothing bigger 
than cedars and wild cherry trees to break 
their sweep. The berry bushes crowd together 
in thick-set patches, waist-high, interspersed 
with big "high-bush" shrubs in clumps or 
alone, low, hoary juniper, and great, dark 
masses of richly glossy, richly fragrant bay. 
The pointed cedars stand about like sentinels, 
stiff enough save where their sensitive tops 
lean delicately away from the wind. In the 
scant herbage between is goldenrod, the earli- 
est and the latest alike at home here, and red 
lilies and asters, and down close to the ground, 
if you care to stoop for them, trailing vines 
of dewberries with their fruit, the sweetest 
of all the blackberries. Truly it is a goodly 
prospect, and one to fill the heart with satis- 
faction that the world is as it is. 



THE LURE OF THE BERRY 135 

The pleasure of huckleberrying is partly in 
the season — the late summer-time, from 
mid-July to September. The poignant joys of 
early spring are passed, and the exuberance of 
early summer, while the keen stimulus of fall 
has not yet come. Things are at poise. The 
haying is over, the meadows, shorn of their 
rich grass, lie tawny-green under the sky, and 
the world seems bigger than before. It is not 
a time for dreams nor a time for exploits; it 
it a time for — for — well, for berrying! 

But you must choose your days carefully, 
as you do your fishing and hunting days. 
The berries "bite best" with a brisk west 
wind, though a south one is not to be despised, 
and a north one gives a pleasant suggestion 
of fall while the sun has still all the fervor of 
summer. Choose a sky that has clouds in it, 
too, for you will feel their movement even 
when you do not look up. Then take your 
pail and set out. Do not be in a hurry and do 
not promise to be back at any definite time. 
Either go alone or with just the right com- 
panion. I do not know any circumstances 
wherein the choice of a companion needs more 
care than in berrying. It may make or mar 



136 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

the whole adventure. For you must have a 
person not too energetic, or a standard of 
speed will be established that will spoil every- 
thing; nor too conscientious — it is madden- 
ing to be told that you have not picked the 
bushes clean enough; nor too diligent, so that 
one feels guilty if one looks at the view or 
acknowledges the breeze; nor too restless, so 
that one is being constantly haled to fresh 
woods and pastures new. A slightly garrul- 
ous person is not bad, with a desultory, semi- 
philosophic bent, and a gift for being con- 
tented with easy physical occupation. In 
fact, I find that I am, by exclusion and inclu- 
sion, narrowing my description to fit a certain 
type of small boy. And indeed I believe that 
here the ideal companion is to be found, — if 
indeed he is not, as I more than suspect he is, 
the ideal companion for every form of recrea- 
tion in life. Yes, the boy is the thing. Some 
of my choicest hours in the berry lots have 
been spent with a boy as companion, some 
boy who loves to be in the wind and sun with- 
out knowing that he loves it, who philos- 
ophizes without knowing that he does so, who 
picks berries with sufficient diligence some- 



THE LURE OF THE BERRY 137 

times, and with a delightful irresponsibihty 
at other times; who hkes to move on, now 
and then, but is happy to kick turf around the 
edges of the clump if you are inclined to stay. 
Who takes pride in filling his pail, but is not 
so desperately single-minded that he is un- 
moved by the seductions of goldenrod in 
bloom, of juniper and bayberries, of dry gold- 
enrod stalks (for kite sticks), of deserted 
birds' nests, and all the other delights that 
fall in his way. 

For berrying does not consist chiefly in 
getting berries, any more than fishing con- 
sists chiefly in getting fish, or hunting in 
getting birds. The essence of berrying is the 
state of mind that accompanies it. It is 
a semi-contemplative recreation, providing 
physical quiet with just enough motion to 
prevent restlessness — being, in this respect, 
like "whittling." I said semi-contemplative, 
because, while it seems to induce meditation, 
the beauty of it is that you don't really med- 
itate at all, you only think you are doing so, 
or are going to. That is what makes it so re- 
cuperative in its effects. It just delicately 
shaves^the line between stimulating you to 



138 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

thought and boring you because it does not 
stimulate. Thus it brings about in you a per- 
fect state of poise most restful in itself and 
in a complete harmony with the midsummer 
season. 

Yes, fishing is good, and hunting is good, 
and all the sports are good in their turn — 
even sitting in a rocking-chair on a boarding- 
house piazza has, perhaps, its charms and its 
benefits for some; — but when the sun is hot 
and the wind is cool, when the hay is in and 
the yellowing fields lie broad, when the woods 
have gathered their birds and their secrets to 
their very hearts, when the sky is deeply, 
warmly blue, and the clouds pile soft or float 
thin and light, then give me a pail and let me 
wander up, up, to the great open berry lots. 
I will let the sun shine on me and the wind 
blow me, and I will love the whole big 
world, and I will think not a single thought, 
and at sundown I will come home with a full 
pail and a contentedly empty mind. 



XI 

In the Rain 

It was raining. It had begun to rain the 
afternoon before; it had rained all night, with 
the drizzling, sozzling kind of rain that indi- 
cated persistence. It had rained all the morn- 
ing; it was obviously going to rain all day. 
The hollow beside the stone hitching-post, 
where the grocer's horse and the butcher's 
horse and the fishman's horse had stamped, 
all through the drought, was now a pool of 
brown water, with the raindrops making 
gooseflesh on it. There was another pond 
under the front gate, and another under the 
hammock; and the middle of the road, in the 
horse rut, was a narrow brown brook. The 
tiger lilies in the old stump were bending with 
their load of wetness, the phlox in the garden 
was weighed down till its white masses nearly 
touched earth. Indoors, when the wind lulled 
and the rain fell straighter, we could hear 
the drops tick-tick-ticking on the bark of 



140 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

the birch logs in the fireplace. This flue of the 
chimney is almost vertical, with a slant to the 
southward, and I have always liked the way 
it lets in samples of the weather — a patch of 
yellow sunshine on clear days, a blur of soft 
white light on gray ones, and on stormy 
ones flicks of rain to make the fire sputter, 
or, as on this particular day, to dampen 
our kindling if it has been laid ready to 
light. 

The belated postman's buggy, with pre- 
sumably a postman inside it somewhere be- 
hind the sheathing of black rubber, drove up, 
our mail-box grated open and shut, and the 
streaming horse sloshed on. Jonathan turned 
up his collar and dashed out to the box, and 
dashed in again, bringing with him a great 
gust of rainy sweetness and the smell of wet 
woolen. 

"Jonathan," I said, "let's take a walk." 

He was unfolding the damp newspaper 
carefully so as not to tear it. "What's 
that? Walk?" 

"That's what I said." 

He had his paper open by this time, and 
was glancing at the headlines. When a man 



IN THE RAIN 141 

is glancing at headlines, it is just as well to let 
him glance. I gave him fifteen minutes. Then 
I reopened the matter. 

"Jonathan, I said walk." 

"What's that.^" His tone was vague. It 
was what I call his newspaper tone. It sug- 
gests extreme remoteness, but tolerance, even 
benevolence, if he is let alone. He drifted 
slowly over to the window and made a pre- 
tense of looking out, but his eyes were still 
running down the columns. "My dear," he 
remarked, still in the same tone, "had you 
noticed that it is beginning to rain.^" 

"I noticed that yesterday afternoon, about 
three o'clock," I said. 

"Oh, all right. I thought perhaps you 
had n't." 

"Well.?" I waited. 

"Well — " he hung fire while he finished 
the tail of the editorial. Then he threw down 
the paper. "Don't you think it's rather poor 
weather for walking.?" 

This was what I had been waiting for, and 
I responded glibly, "Some one has said there 
is no such thing as bad weather, there are only 
good clothes." 



142 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"Do you mean mine?" He grinned down 
at his farm regimentals. 
/'Well, then— " 

"Why, of course, if you really mean it," he 
said, and added, as he looked out reflectively 
at the puddling road, "You'll get your hair 
wet." 

"Hope so! Now, Jonathan, aren't you 
silly, really.'^ Anybody would think we'd 
never been for a walk in the rain before in our 
lives. Perhaps you 'd rather stay indoors and 
be a tabby-cat and keep dry." 

"Who got the mail.?" 

"You did. But you wanted the paper — 
and you ran." 

The fact was, as I very well knew, Jonathan 
really wanted to go, but he did n't want to 
start. When people really enjoy doing a 
thing, and mean to do it, and yet won't get 
going, something has to be done to get them 
going. That was why I spoke of tabby-cats. 

Jonathan assumed an alert society tone. 
"I should enjoy a walk very much, thank 
you," he said; "the weather seems to me per- 
fect. But," he added abruptly, "wear woolen; 
that white thing won't do." 



IN THE RAIN 143 

"Of course!" I went ofiF and made myself 
fit — woolen for warmth, though the day 
was not cold, a short khaki skirt, an old 
felt hat, and old shoes. Out we went into 
the drenched world. Whish! A gust of rain 
in my eyes half blinded me, and I ran 
under the big maples. I heard Jonathan 
chuckle. "I can't help it," I gasped; "I'll be 
wet enough in a few minutes, and then I 
shan't care." 

From the maples I made for the lee of the 
barn eaves, disturbing the hens who were 
sulking there. They stepped ostentatiously 
out into the rainy barnyard with an air of 
pointedly not noticing me, but of knowing all 
the time whose fault it was. They were n't 
liking the weather, anyhow, the hens were n't, 
and showed it plainly in the wet, streaky 
droop of their feathers and the exasperated 
look in their red eyes. "Those hens look as if 
they thought I could do something about it if 
I only would," I said to Jonathan as we passed 
them. 

"Yes, they are n't a cordial crowd. Here, 
we'll show them how to take weather!" 

We were passing under an apple tree; Jona- 



144 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

than seized a drooping bough, and a sheet of 
water shook itself out on our shoulders. I 
gasped and ducked, and a hen who stood too 
near scuttered off with low duckings of in- 
dignation. 

"Now you're really wet, you can enjoy 
yourself," said Jonathan; and there was 
something in it, though I was loath to admit 
it at the moment. A moment before I had 
felt rather appalled at the sight of the rain- 
swept lane; now I hastened on recklessly. 

"I think," said Jonathan, "it's the back of 
my neck that counts. After that 's wet I don't 
care what happens." 

"Yes," I agreed, "that's a stronghold. But 
I think with me it's my shoulders." 

It did not really matter which it was; 
neck and shoulders both were wet, — back, 
arms, everything. We tramped down across 
the hollow, over the brook, whose flood was 
backing up into the swamp on each side. I 
paused to look off across the huckleberry 
hillside beyond. 

" How the rain changes everything ! " I said. 

All the colors had freshened and darkened, 
and the blur of the rain softened the picture 



IN THE RAIN 145 

and "brought it together," as the painters 
say. 

"Well," said Jonathan, "woods or open?" 

"Which is the wettest?" 

"Woods." 

"Then woods." 

And we plunged in under the big chestnuts, 
through a mass of witch-hazel and birch. 

Jonathan was quite right. Woods were the 
wettest. One can hardly fancy anything 
quite so wet. Solid water, like a river, is not 
comparable, because it is all in one lump; 
you know where it is, and you can get out of 
it when you want to. But here in the woods 
the water was everywhere, ready to hurl itself 
upon us, from above, from beside us, from 
below. Every step, every motion, drew upon 
us drenching showers of great drops that had 
been hanging heavily in the leaves ready to 
break away at a touch. Little streamlets of 
water ran from the drooping edges of my hat 
and from my chin, water dashed in my eyes 
and I blinked it out. 

Jonathan, pausing to hold back a dripping 
spray of blackberry, heavy with fruit, re- 
marked, "Are n't you getting a little damp? " 



146 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"I wonder if I am!" I answered joyously, 
and plunged on into the next thicket. 

There is as much exhilaration in being out 
in a big rain and getting really rained through, 
as there is in being out in surf. It has nothing 
in common with the sensations that arise 
when, umbrellaed and mackintoshed and 
rubber-overshoed, we pick our way gingerly 
along the street, wondering how much we 
can keep dry, hoping everything is "up" all 
round, wishing the wind would n't keep chang- 
ing and blowing the umbrella so, and fancying 
how we shall look when we "get there." But 
when you don't care — when you want to get 
wet, and do — there is a physical glow that 
is delightful, a sense of being washed through 
and through, of losing one's identity almost, 
and being washed away into the great swirl 
of nature where one does n't count much, but 
is glad to be taken in as a part. I fancy this is 
true with any of the elements — earth, air, 
water. The tale of Antaeus was no mere leg- 
end; there is real strength for us in close con- 
tact with the earth. There is a purifying and 
uplifting potency in the winds, a potency in 
the waters — ocean and river and great rain. 



IN THE RAIN 147 

Our civilization has dealt with all these so 
successfully that we are apt to think of them 
as docile servants, or perhaps as petty annoy- 
ances, and we lose the sense of their power 
unless we deliberately go out to meet them in 
their own domain and let them have their 
way with us. Then, indeed, they sweep us 
out of ourselves for a season, and that is 
good. 

We came out from the thickets on a high, 
brushy field, sheeted in fine rain that dimmed 
even the near wood edges. Blackberries grew 
thick, and we made our way carefully among 
the briers, following the narrow and devious 
cow-paths. Suddenly we both stopped. • Just 
ahead of us, under a blackberry bush, was a 
huge snapping-turtle. He was standing on his 
hind legs, with his fore legs resting on a 
branch loaded with fruit, his narrow dark 
head stretched far up and out, while he 
quietly ate berry after berry. He was a hand- 
some fellow, with his big black shell all bril- 
liant in the wetness of the rain. As he worked 
we could see his under side, and notice how it 
shaded to yellow along the sutures. It was a 
scene of contentment, and the berries, drip- 



148 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

ping with fresh raindrops, looked luscious in- 
deed as he feasted. 

We stood and watched him for a while, and 
I got an entirely new idea of turtles. Turtles 
usually have too much reserve, too much self- 
consciousness, too little abandon, and I had 
never seen one so "come out of himself," lit- 
erally and figuratively, as this fellow did. It 
made me want to follow up the acquaintance, 
this happy chance of finding him, so to speak, 
in his cups; but I repressed the desire, feeling 
that he might not share it, and we carefully 
backed away and went around by another 
path so as not to disturb the reveler. He never 
knew how much pleasure he had given as well 
as received. 

Into the woods again — "Look out!" said 
Jonathan. "Don't step on the lizards!" 

He stooped and picked up one, which struck 
an attitude among his dripping fingers — 
sleek back a little arched, legs in odd, uncouth 
positions, tail set stiffly in a queer curve. They 
are brilliant little creatures, with their clear 
orange-red coats, scarlet-spotted, like a trout. 

"Pretty little chap, is n't he.^" said Jona- 
than. 



IN THE RAIN 149 

"Stylish," I said, "but foolish. They never 
do anything that I can see, except attitud- 
inize. 

"But they do a great deal of that," said 
Jonathan, as he set him gently down. 

"Come on," I said; "I can't stand here 
being sentimental over your pets. It's rain- 
mg. 

"Oh, if you 'd like to go — " said Jonathan, 
and set a pace. 

I followed hard, and we raced down through 
the empty woods, sliding over the great wet 
rocks, rolling over black fallen tree trunks, 
our feet sinking noiselessly in the soft leaf 
mould of the forest floor. Out again, and 
through the edge of a cornfield where the 
broad, wavy ribbon leaves squeaked as we 
thrust them aside, as only corn leaves can 
squeak. If we had not been wet already, this 
would have finished us. There is nothing 
any wetter than a wet cornfield. 

On over the open pastures, with a grassy 
swamp at the bottom. We tramped care- 
lessly through it, not even looking for tus- 
socks, and the water sucked merrily in and 
out of our shoes. Into brush once more — 



150 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

thick hazel and scrub oak; then down a slope, 
and we were in the hemlock ravine — a won- 
derful bit of tall woods, dark-shadowed, sol- 
emn, hardly changed by the rain, only per- 
haps a thought darker and stiller, with deeper 
blue depths of hazy distance between the 
straight black trunks. At the bottom a brook 
with dark pools lying beneath mossy rock 
ledges, or swirling under great hemlock roots, 
little waterfalls, and shallow rapids over 
smooth-worn rock faces. It is a wonderful 
place, a place for a German fairy tale. 

The woods were empty — in a sense, yes. 
Except for the lizards, the animals run to 
cover during the rain; woodchucks, rabbits, 
squirrels, are tucked away somewhere out of 
sight and sound. Bird notes are hushed; the 
birds, lurking close-reefed under the lee of 
the big branches or the heavy foliage, or at 
the heart of the cedar trees, make no sign as 
we pass. 

Empty, yet not lonely. When the sun is 
out and the sky is high and bright, one feels 
that the world is a large place, belonging to 
many creatures. But when the sky shuts down 
and the world is close-wrapped in rain and 



IN THE RAIN 151 

drifting mist, it seems to grow smaller and 
more intimate. Instead of feeling the multi- 
tudinousness of the life of woods and fields, 
one feels its unity. We are brought together 
in the bonds of the rain — we and all the 
hidden creatures — we seem all in one room 
together. 

Thus swept into the unity of a dominating 
mood, the woods sometimes gain a voice of 
their own. I heard it first on a stormy night 
when I was walking along the wood road to 
meet Jonathan. It was a night of wind and 
rain and blackness — blackness so dense that 
it seemed a real thing, pressing against my 
eyes, so complete that at the fork in the roads 
I had to feel with my hand for the wheel ruts 
in order to choose the right one. As I grew 
accustomed to the swish of the rain in my face 
and the hoarse breath of the wind about mv 
ears I became aware of another sound — a 
background of tone. I thought at first it was 
a child calling, but no, it was not that; it was 
not a call, but a song; and not that either — 
it was more like many voices, high but not 
shrill, and very far away, softly intoning. It 
was neither sad nor joyous; it suggested 



152 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

dreamy, reiterant thoughts; it was not music, 
but the memory of music. If one listened too 
keenly, it was gone, like a faint star which 
can be glimpsed only if one looks a little 
away from it. 

As I had listened that night I began to 
wonder if it was all my own fancy, and when 
I met Jonathan I made him stop. 

"Wait a minute," I begged him, "and lis- 
ten." 

"I hear it. Come on," he had said. Supper 
was in his thoughts. 

"What do you hear .^" 

"Just what you do." 

"What's that.f^" I had persisted, as we 
fumbled our way along. 

"Voices — I don't know what you'd call 
it — the woods. It often sounds like that in a 
big rain." 

Jonathan's matter-of-factness had rather 
pleased me. 

"I thought it might be my imagination. 
I'm glad it was n't," I said. 

"Perhaps it's both our imaginations," he 
suggested. 

"No. We both do lots of imagining, but 



IN THE RAIN 153 

it never overlaps. When it does, it shows it's 



so." 



Perhaps I was not very clear, but he seemed 
to understand. 

Since then I have heard it now and again, 
this singing of the rain-swept woods. Not 
often, for it is a capricious thing, or perhaps 
I ought rather to say I do not understand the 
manner of its uprising. Rain alone will not 
bring it to pass, wind alone will not, and some- 
times even when they are importuned by wind 
and rain together the woods are silent. Per- 
haps, too, it is not every stretch of woods that 
can sing, or at all seasons. In winter they can 
whistle, and sigh, and creak, but I am sure 
that when I have heard these singing voices 
the trees have always had their full leafage. 
But however it comes about, I am glad of the 
times that I have heard it. And whenever I 
read tales of the Wild Huntsman and all his 
kind, there come into my mind as an inter- 
preting background memories of wonderful 
black nights and storm-ridden woods swept 
by overtones of distant and elusive sound. 

We did not hear the woods sing that day. 
Perhaps there was not wind enough, or per- 



154 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

haps the woods on the "home piece" are not 
big enough, for it chances that I have never 
heard the sound there. 

As we came up the lane at dusk we saw the 
ghmmer of the house hghts. 

"Does n't that look good?" I said to Jona- 
than. "And won't it be good when we are all 
dry and in front of the fire and you have your 
pipe and I'm making toast?" 

I am perfectly sure that Jonathan agreed 
with me, but what he said was, "I thought 
you came out for pleasure." 

"Well, can't I come home for pleasure 
too?" I asked. 



XII 

As the Bee Flies 

Jonathan had taken me to see the "bee 
tree" down in the "old John Lane lot." 
Judging from the name, the spot must have 
been a clearing at one time, but now it is one 
of the oldest pieces of woodland in the local- 
ity. The bee tree, a huge chestnut, cut down 
thirty years ago for its store of honey, is sink- 
ing back into the forest floor, but we could 
still see its hollow heart and charred sides 
where the fire had been made to smoke out 
the bees. 

"Jonathan," I said, "I'd like to find some 
wild honey. It sounds so good." 

"No better than tame honey," said Jona- 
than. 

"It sounds better. I'm sure it would be 
different scooped out of a tree like this than 
done up neatly in pound squares." 

"Tastes just the same," persisted Jonathan 
prosaically. 



156 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"Well, anyway, I want to find a bee tree. 
Let's go bee-hunting!" 

''What's the use? You don't know a 
honeybee from a bumblebee." 

*'Well, you do, of course," I answered, 
tactfully. 

Jonathan, mollified, became gracious. "I 
never went bee-hunting, but I've heard the 
old fellows tell how it's done. But it takes all 
day." 

"So much the better," I said. 

And that night I looked through our books 
to find out what I could about bees. Over the 
fireplace in what was once the "best parlor" 
is a long, low cupboard with glass doors. Here 
Bibles, albums, and a few other books have 
always been stored, and from this I pulled 
down a fat, gilt-lettered volume called "The 
Household Friend." This book has something 
to say about almost everything, and, sure 
enough, it had an article on bees. But the 
Household Friend had obviously never gone 
bee-hunting, and the only real information I 
got was that bees had four wings and six legs. 

"So has a fly," said Jonathan, when I came 
to him with this nugget of wisdom. 



AS THE BEE FLIES 157 

The neighbors gave suggestions. "You 
want to go when the yeller-top's in bloom," 
said one. 

"Yellow-top?" I questioned, stupidly 
enough. 

"Yes. Yeller-top — 't 's in bloom now," 
with a comprehensive wave of the hand. 

"Oh, you mean goldenrod!" 

"Well, I guess you call it that. Yeller-top 
we call it. You find one o' them old back 
fields where the yeller-top's come in, 'n' you'll 
see bees 'nough." 

Another friend told us that when we had 
caught our bee we must drop honey on her 
back. This would send her to the hive to get 
her friends to groom her off, and they would 
all return with her to see where the honey 
came from. This sounded improbable, but we 
were in no position to criticize our informa- 
tion. 

As to the main points of procedure all our 
advisers agreed. We were to put honey in an 
open box, catch a bee in it, and when she had 
loaded up with honey, let her go, watch her 
flight and locate the direction of her home. 
When she returned with friends for more 



158 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

honey, we were to shut them in, carry the box 
on in the line of flight, and let them go again. 
We were to keep this up until we reached the 
bee tree. It sounded simple. 

We got our box — two boxes, to be sure of 
our resources — baited them with chunks of 
comb, and took along little window panes for 
covers. Then we packed up luncheon and set 
out for an abandoned pasture in our woods 
where we remembered the "yeller-top" grew 
thick. Our New England fall mornings are 
cool, and as we walked up the shady wood 
road Jonathan predicted that it would be no 
use to hunt bees. *' They '11 be so stiff they 
can't crawl. Look at that lizard, now!" He 
stooped and touched a little red newt lying 
among the pebbles of the roadway. The little 
fellow seemed dead, but when Jonathan held 
him in the hollow of his hand for a few mo- 
ments he gradually thawed out, began to 
wriggle, and finally dropped through between 
his fingers and scampered under a stone. 
"See.^" said Jonathan. "We'll have to thaw 
out every bee just that way." 

But I had confidence that the sun would 
take the place of Jonathan's hand, and re- 



AS THE BEE FLIES 159 

fused to give up my hunt. From the main 
log-road we turned oflf into a path, once a well- 
trodden way to the old ox pastures, but now 
almost overgrown, and pushed on through 
brier and sweet-fern and huckleberry and 
young birch, down across a little brook, and 
up again to the "old Sharon lot," a long jBeld 
framed in big woods and grown up to sumac 
and brambles and goldenrod. It was warmer 
here, in the steady sunshine, sheltered from 
the crisp wind by the tree walls around us, 
and we began to look about hopefully for bees. 
At first Jonathan's gloomy prognostications 
seemed justified — there was not a bee in 
sight. A few wasps were stirring, trailing their 
long legs as they flew. Then one or two "yel- 
low jackets" appeared, and some black-and- 
white hornets. But as the field grew warmer 
it grew populous, bumblebees hummed, and 
finally some little soft brown bees arrived 
— surely the ones we wanted. Cautiously 
Jonathan approached one, held his box under 
the goldenrod clump, brought the glass down 
slowly from above — and the bee was ours. 
She was a gentle little thing, and did not seem 
to resent her treatment at all, but dropped 



160 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

down on to the honeycomb and fell to work. 
Jonathan had providently cut a three-forked 
stick, and he now stuck this into the ground 
and set the box on the forks so that it was 
about on a level with the goldenrod tops. 
Then he carefully drew off the glass, and we 
sat down to watch. 

"Should n't you think she must have had 
enough?" I said, after a while — "Oh! there 
she comes now!" 

Our bee appeared on the edge of the box, 
staggering heavily. She rubbed her legs, 
rubbed her wings, shook herself, girded up 
her loins, as it were, and brushed the hair out 
of her eyes, and finally rose, turning on her- 
self in a close spiral which widened into larger 
and larger circles above the box, and at 
length, after two or three wide sweeps w^here 
we nearly lost track of her, she darted off in a 
"bee-line" for a tall chestnut tree on a knoll 
to the westward. 

"Will she come back?" we wondered. Five 
minutes — ten — fifteen — it seemed an 
hour. 

"She must have been a drone," said Jona- 
than. 



AS THE BEE FLIES 161 

"Or maybe she was n't a honeybee at all," 
I suggested, gloomily. " She might be just an- 
other kind of hornet — no, look ! There she is ! " 

I could hardly have been more thrilled if 
my fairy godmother had appeared on the 
goldenrod stalk and waved her wand at me. 
To think that the bee really did play the game ! 
I knelt and peered in over the side of the box. 
Yes, there she was, all six feet in the honey, 
pumping away with might and main through 
her little red tongue, or proboscis, or whatever 
it was. We sank back among the weeds and 
waited for her to go. As she rose, in the same 
spirals, and disappeared westward, Jonathan 
said, "If she does n't bring another one back 
with her this time, we'll try dropping honey 
on her back. You wait here and be a land- 
mark for the bee while I try to catch another 
one in the other box." 

I settled down comfortably under the yel- 
low-top, and instantly I realized what a pleas- 
ant thing it is to be a landmark. For one 
thing, when you sit down in a field you get a 
very different point of view from that when 
you stand. Goldenrod is different looked at 
from beneath, with sky beyond it; sky is dif- 



162 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

ferent seen through waving masses of yellow. 
Moreover, when you sit still outdoors, the 
life of things comes to you; when you are 
moving yourself, it evades you. Down among 
the weeds where I sat, the sun was hot, but the 
breeze was cool, and it brought to me, now 
the scent of wild grapes from an old stonewall, 
now the spicy fragrance of little yellow apples 
on a gnarled old tree in the fence corner, now 
the sharp tang of the goldenrod itself. The 
air was full of the hum of bees, and soon I 
began to distinguish their different tones — 
the deep, rich drone of the bumblebees, the 
higher singsong of the honeybees, the snarl 
of the yellow- jacket, the jerky, nasal twang 
of the black-and-white hornet. They began 
to come close around me; two bumblebees 
hung on a frond of goldenrod so close to my 
face that I could see the pollen dust on their 
fur. Crickets and grasshoppers chirped and 
trilled beside me. All the little creatures 
seemed to have accepted me — all but one 
black-and-white hornet, who left his proper 
pursuits, whatever they may have been, to 
investigate me. He buzzed all around me in 
an insistent, ill-bred way that was annoying. 



AS THE BEE FLIES 163 

He examined my neck and hair with unneces- 
sary thoroughness, flew away, returned to 
begin all over again, flew away and returned 
once more; but at last even he gave up the 
matter and went off about his business. 

Butterflies came fluttering past me : — big, 
rust-colored ones pointed in black; pale russet 
and silver ones; dancing little yellow ones; 
big black ones with blue-green spots, rather 
shabby and languid, as at the end of a gay 
season. Darning-needles darted back and 
forth, with their javelin-like flight, or mounted 
high by sudden steps, or lighted near me, with 
that absolute rigidity that is the positive 
negation of movement. A flying grasshopper 
creeping along through the tangle at my feet 
rose and hung flutteringly over one spot, for 
no apparent reason, and then, for no better 
reason, dropped suddenly and was still. A big 
cicada with green head and rustling wings 
worked his way clumsily among a pile of last 
year's goldenrod stalks, freed himself, and 
whirred away with the harsh, strident buzz 
that dominates every other sound while it 
lasts, and when it ceases makes the world 
seem wonderfully quiet. 



164 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

Our bee had gone and come twice before 
Jonathan returned. ''Hasn't she brought 
anybody yet? Well, here goes!" He took a 
slender stem of goldenrod, smeared it with 
honey, and gently lodged a drop on the bee's 
back, just where she could not by any possible 
antics get it off for herself. When the little 
thing flew she fairly reeled under her burden, 
tumbled down on to a leaf, recovered herself, 
and at last flew off on her old line. 

"Now, let's go and cook luncheon," said 
Jonathan, "and leave her to work it out." 

"But how can I move.^ I'm a land- 
mark." 

"Oh, leave your handkerchief. Anything 
white will do." 

So I tied my handkerchief to a goldenrod 
stalk, and we went back to the brook. W^e 
made a fire on a flat stone, under which we 
could hear the brook running, broiled our chops 
on long, forked sticks, broiled some "beef- 
steak" mushrooms that we had found on a 
chestnut stump, and ended with water from 
the spring under the giant birch tree. Blue 
jays came noisily to investigate us; a yellow- 
hammer floated softly down to the branch 



AS THE BEE FLIES 165 

overhead, gave a little purring cluck of sur- 
prise, and flew off again, with a flare of tawny- 
yellow wings. In the warmth of the Indian 
summer noon the shade of the woods was 
pleasant, and I let Jonathan go back to the 
bees while I lay on a dry slope above the brook 
and watched the slim, tall chestnuts swaying 
in the wind. It is almost like being at sea to 
lie in the woods and look up at the trees. 
Their waving tops seem infinitely far away, 
but the sky beyond seems very near, and one 
can almost feel the earth go round. 

As I lay there I heard a snapping of twigs 
and rustling of leaves. It was the wrong direc- 
tion for Jonathan, and I turned gently, expect- 
ing nothing smaller than a deer — for deer 
are growing plentiful now in old New England 
— and met the shameless face of a jerky little 
red squirrel! He clung to a chestnut trunk 
and examined me, twitching all over the while, 
then whisked himself upside down and looked 
at me from that standpoint, mounted to a 
branch, clung to the under side and looked 
again, pretended fright and vanished behind 
the limb, only to peer over it the next moment 
to see what I looked like from there — all the 



166 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

time clucking and burring like an alarm clock 
under a pillow. 

The rude thing had broken the spell of 
quiet, and I got up, remembering the bees, 
and wandered back to the sunny field, now 
palpitating with waves of heat. Jonathan was 
nowhere to be seen, but as I approached the 
box I discovered him beside it flat on his back 
among the weeds. 

"Sh-h-h," he warned, "don't frighten them. 
There were a lot of them when I got here and 
I've been watching their line. They all go 
straight for that chestnut." 

"What are you lying down for.^" I asked. 

"I had to. I nearly twisted my neck ofiF 
following their circles. I'm no owl." 

I sat down near by and we watched a few 
more go, while others began to arrive. 

"That dab of honey did the work," said 
Jonathan. "We might as well begin to follow 
up their line now." 

Waiting till there were a dozen or more in 
the box, he gently slid on the glass cover, laid 
a paper over it to darken it, and we set out. 
Ten minutes' walking brought us past the big 
chestnut and out to a little clearing. Jonathan 



AS THE BEE FLIES 167 

set the box down on a big rock where it would 
show up well, laid a handkerchief beside it, 
drew off the glass, and crouched. A bunch of 
excited bees burst out and away, without 
noticing their change of place. " They '11 never 
find their way back there," said Jonathan 
regretfully; "they'll go straight back to the 
Sharon lot." 

But there were others in the box, still feed- 
ing, who had not been disturbed by the move, 
and these he touched with honey drops. They 
staggered off, one by one, orienting them- 
selves properly as they rose, and taking the 
same old line off to the westward. This was 
disappointing. We had hoped to see them 
turn back, showing that we had passed their 
home tree. However, there was nothing to do 
but sit and wait for them. In six minutes they 
began to come back, in twos and threes — 
evidently the honey drops on their shoulders 
had told the hive a sufficiently alluring story. 
Again we waited until the box was well filled 
with them, then closed it and went on west- 
ward. Two more moves brought us to a half- 
cleared ridge from which we could see out 
across country. To the westward, and sadly 



168 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

near, was the end of the big woods and the 
beginning of pastures and farmland. 

Jonathan scrutinized the farms dotting the 
slopes. "See that bunch of red barns with a 
white house?" he said. "That's Bill More- 
head's. He keeps bees. Bet we 've got bees 
from his hive and they'll lead us plumb into 
his back yard." 

It did begin to seem probable, and we took 
up our box in some depression of spirits. Two 
more stops, the bees still perversely flying 
westward, and we emerged in pastures. 

"Here's our last stop," said Jonathan. "If 
they don't go back into that edge we've just 
left, they 're Morehead's. There is n't another 
bit of woods big enough to hold a bee tree for 
seven miles to the west of us." 

There was no rock to set the box on, so we 
lay down on the turf; Jonathan set the box 
on his chest, and partly slid the cover. He 
had by this time learned the trick of making 
the bees, even the excited ones, come out 
singly. We watched each one as she escaped 
circle above us, circle, circle against the clear 
blue of the afternoon sky, then dart off — 
alas ! — vv estward. As the last one flew we 



AS THE BEE FLIES 169 

sat up, disconsolately, and gazed across the 
pasture. 

"Tame bees ! " muttered Jonathan, in a tone 
of grief and disgust. "Tame bees, down there 
in my old woodlots. It's trespass!" 

"You might claim some of Morehead's 
honey," I suggested, "since you've been 
feeding his bees. But, then," I reflected, "it 
would n't be wild honey, and what I wanted 
was wild honey." 

We rose dejectedly, and Jonathan picked 
up the box. "Are n't you going to leave it for 
the bees.P" I asked. "They'll be so disap- 
pointed when they come back." 

"They aren't the only ones to be disap- 
pointed," he remarked grimly. "Here, we'll 
have mushrooms for supper, anyway." And 
he stooped to collect a big puff-ball. 

We walked home, our spirits gradually 
rising. After all, it is hard to stay depressed 
under a blue fall sky, with a crisp wind blow- 
ing in your face and the sense of complete- 
ness that comes of a long day out of doors. 
And as we climbed the last long hill to the 
home farm we could not help feeling cheer- 
ful. 



170 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"Bee-hunting is fun," I said, "even if they 
are tame bees." 

"It's the best excuse for being a loafer that 
I've found yet," said Jonathan; "I wonder 
the tramps don't all go into the business." 

"And some day," I pursued hopefully, 
"we'll go again and find really wild bees and 
really wild honey." 

"It would taste just the same, you know," 
jeered Jonathan. 

And I was so content with life that I let 
him have the last word. 



xm 

A Dawn Experiment 

I HAVE tried dawn fishing, and found it want- 
ing. I have tried dawn hunting in the woods, 
after "partridges," and found it not all that 
Jonathan, in his buoyant enthusiasm, appears 
to think it. And so, when he grew eloquent 
regarding the delights of dawn hunting on the 
marshes, I was not easily fired. I even referred, 
though very considerately, to some of our 
previous experiences in affairs of this nature, 
and confessed a certain reluctance to experi- 
ment further along these lines. 

"Well, you have had a run of hard luck," 
he admitted tolerantly, "but you'll find the 
plover-shooting different. I know you won't 
be sorry." 

I do not mean to be narrow or prejudiced, 
and so I consented, though rather hesitat- 
ingly, to try one more dawn adventure. 

We packed up our guns, ammunition, extra 
wraps, rubber boots, and alarm clock. These 



172 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

five things are essential — nay, six are neces- 
sary to real content, and the sixth is a bottle 
of tar and sweet oil. But of that more anon. 

Thus equipped, we went down to a tiny 
cottage on the shore. We reached the village 
at dusk, stopped at "the store" to buy bread 
and butter and fruit, then went on to the 
little white house that we knew would always 
be ready to receive us. It has served us as a 
hunting-lodge many times before, and has 
always treated us well. 

There is something very pleasant about 
going back to a well-known place of this sort. 
It offers the joy of home and the joy of camp- 
ing, the charm of strangeness and the charm 
of familiarity. We light the candles and look 
about. Ah, yes ! There are the magazines we 
left last winter when we came down for the 
duck-shooting, there is the bottle of ink we got 
to fill our pens one stormy day last spring in 
the trout season, when the downpour quenched 
the zeal even of Jonathan. In the pantry are 
the jars of sugar and salt and cereals and tea 
and coffee and bacon; in the kitchen are the 
oil stoves ready to light; in the dining-room 
are the ashes of our last fire. 



A DAWN EXPERIMENT 173 

Contentedly I set about making tea and 
arranging the supper-table, while Jonathan 
took a basket and pitcher and went off to a 
neighbor for eggs and milk. We made a fire 
on the hearth, toasted bread over the embers, 
and supped frugally but very cozily. 

Afterwards came the setting of the alarm 
clock — a matter of critical importance. 

"What hour shall it be.'^" inquired Jona- 
than, his finger on the regulator. 

"Whenever you think best," I answered 
cheerfully. 

Now, as we both understood, I had no real 
intention of being literally guided by what 
Jonathan thought best, — that would have 
been too rash, — but it opened negotiations 
pleasantly to say so. 

Jonathan, trying to be obliging against his 
better judgment, suggested, "Well — six 
o'clock.?" 

But I refused any such tremendous conces- 
sion, knowing that I should have to bear the 
ignominy of it if the adventure proved unfor- 
tunate. "No, of course not. Six is much too 
late. Anybody can get up at six." 

"Well, then," he brightened; "say five.?" 



174 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"Five," I meditated. ''No, it's quite light 
at five. We ought to be out there at dayhght, 
you said." 

Jonathan visibly expanded. He realized 
that I was behaving very well. I thought so 
myself, and it made us both very amiable. 

"Yes," he admitted, "we ought to be, of 
course. And it will take three quarters of an 
hour to drive out there. Add fifteen minutes 
to that for breakfast, and fifteen minutes to 
dress — would a quarter to four be too out- 
rageous .f^" 

"Oh, make it half-past three," I rejoined 
recklessly, in a burst of self-sacrifice. 

At least I would not spoke our wheels by 
slothfulness. The clock was set accordingly, 
and I went to sleep enveloped in virtue as in 
a garment, the sound of the sea in my ears. 

Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r ! What has happened.? 
Oh, the alarm clock! It can't be more than 
twelve o'clock. I hear the spit of a match, 
then "Half-past three," from Jonathan. 
*^No!" I protest. "Yes," he persists, and 
though his voice is still veiled in sleep, I de- 
tect in it a firmness to which I foresee I shall 



A DAWN EXPERIMENT 175 

yield. My virtue of last night has faded com- 
pletely, but his zeal is fast colors. I am ready 
to back out, but, dimly remembering my 
Spartan attitude of the night before, I don't 
dare. Thus are we enslaved by our virtues. 
I submit, with only one word of comment — 
"And we call this pleasure!" To which Jona- 
than wisely makes no response. 

We groped our way downstairs, lighted 
another candle, and sleepily devoured some 
sandwiches and milk — a necessary but cheer- 
less process, with all the coziness of the night 
before conspicuously left out. We heard the 
carriage being brought up outside, we snatched 
up our wraps, — sweaters, shawls, coats, — 
Jonathan picked up the valise with the hunt- 
ing equipment, we blew out the candles, and 
went out into the chilly darkness. As our eyes 
became accustomed to the change, we per- 
ceived that the sky was not quite black, but 
gray, and that the stars were fewer than in the 
real night. We got in, tucked ourselves up 
snugly, and started off down the road stretch- 
ing faintly before us. The horse's steps 
sounded very loud, and echoed curiously 
against the silent houses as we passed. As we 



176 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

went on, the sky grew paler, here and there 
in the houses a candle gleamed, in the barn- 
yards a lantern flashed — the farmer was 
astir. Yes, dawn was really coming. 

After a few miles we turned off the main 
highway to take the rut road through the great 
marsh. The smell of the salt flats was about 
us, and the sound of the sea was growing 
more clear again. A big bird whirred off from 
the marsh close beside us. "Meadowlark," 
murmured Jonathan. Another little one, with 
silent, low flight, then more. "Sandpipers," 
he commented; "we don't want them." The 
patient horse plodded along, now in damp 
marsh soil, now in dry, deep sand, to thehitch- 
ing-place by an old barn on the cliff. 

As we pulled up, Jonathan took a little 
bottle out of his pocket and handed it to me. 
"Better put it on now," he said. 

"What is it.?" I asked. 

"Tar and sweet oil — for the mosquitoes." 

I smelled of it with suspicion. It was a dark, 
gummy liquid. "I think I prefer the mosqui- 
toes." 

"You do!" said Jonathan. "You'll think 
again pretty soon. Here, let me have it." He 



A DAWN EXPERIMENT 177 

had tied the horse and blanketed him, and 
now proceeded to smear himself with the stuff 
— face, neck, hands. "You need n't look at 
me that way!" he remarked genially; "you'll 
be doing it yourself soon. Just wait." 

We took our guns and cartridges, and 
plunged down from the cliff to the marsh. As 
we did so there rose about me a brown cloud, 
which in a moment I realized was composed 
of mosquitoes — a crazy, savage, bloodthirsty 
mob. They beset me on all sides, — they were 
in my hair, my eyes, nose, ears, mouth, neck. 
I brushed frantically at them, but a drowning 
man might as well try to brush back the water 
as it closes in. 

"Where's the bottle.?" I gasped. 

"What bottle.?" said Jonathan, innocently. 
Jonathan is human. 

"The tar and sweet oil. Quick!" 

"Oh! I thought you preferred the mosqui- 
toes." Yes, Jonathan is human. 

"Never mind what you thought!" and I 
snatched greedily at the blessed little bottle. 

I poured the horrid stuff on my face, my 
neck, my hands, I out-Jonathaned Jonathan; 
then I took a deep breath of relief as the mos- 



178 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

quito mob withdrew to a respectful distance. 
Jonathan reached for the bottle. 

"Oh, I can just as well carry it," I said, 
and tucked it into one of my hunting-coat 
pockets. 

Jonathan chuckled gently, but I did not 
care. Nothing should part me from that little 
bottle of ill-smelling stuff. 

We started on again, out across the marsh. 
Enough light had come to show us the gray- 
green level, full of mists and little glimmers 
of water, and dotted with low haycocks, their 
dull, tawny yellow showing softly in the faint 
dawn light. 

"Hark!" said Jonathan. 

We paused. Through the fog came a faint, 
whistling call, in descending half-tones, inde- 
scribable, coming out of nowhere, sounding 
now close beside us, now very far away. 

" Yellowlegs," said Jonathan. "We are n't 
a bit too soon." 

We pushed out into the midst of the marsh, 
now sinking knee-deep in the spongy bed, now 
walking easily on a stretch of firm turf, now 
stepping carefully over a boundary ditch of 
unknown depth — out to the haycocks, where 



A DAWN EXPERIMENT 179 

we sank down, each beside one, to wait for 
the birds to move. 

I do not know how long we waited. The 
haycock was warm, the night wind had fallen, 
the gray sky was turning white, with prim- 
rose tones in the east ; the morning star paled 
and disappeared; the marsh mists partly 
lifted, and revealed far inland the soft, dark 
masses of encircling woods. And every little 
while came the whistling call, plaintive, yet 
curiously hurried, coming from nowhere. I 
lay back against the hay, and, contrary to 
orders, I let my gun slip down beside me. The 
fact was, I had half forgotten that anything 
definite was expected of me, and when sud- 
denly I heard a warning "Lookout!" from 
Jonathan's mow, I was in no way prepared. 
There was a rush of wings ; the air was full of 
the whistling notes of the birds as they flew; 
they passed over us, circling, rising, sinking, 
sweeping far up the marsh, then, as Jonathan 
whistled their call, circling back again out of 
the mist at incredible speed. 

Probably it would have made no difference 
if I had been prepared. A new kind of game 
always leaves me dazed, and now I watched 



180 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

them, spellbound, until I heard Jonathan 
shoot. Then I made a great effort, pulled at 
my trigger, and rolled backwards from my 
haycock into the spongy swamp, inches deep 
with water just there. 

Jonathan called across softly, "Shot both 
barrels, did n't you.^" 

I rose slowly, wishing there were some way 
of wringing out my entire back. "Of course 
not!" I gasped indignantly. 

"Think not.^^" very benevolently from the 
other cock. " 'T would n't have kicked like 
that if you had n't. Look at your gun and 
see." 

I reseated myself damply upon the hay- 
cock. '' 1 tell y oul did nH. Why should I shoot 
both at once, I'd like to know! I — never — " 

Here I stopped, for as I broke open my gun 
I saw two dented cartridges, and as I pulled 
them out white smoke rolled from both bar- 
rels. There seemed nothing further to be said, 
at least by a woman, so I said nothing. Jona- 
than also, though human, said nothing. It is 
crises like these that test character. I turned 
my cool back to the east, that the rising sun, 
if it ever really got thoroughly risen, might 



A DAWN EXPERIMENT 181 

warm it, and grimly reloaded. Jonathan con- 
tinued his call to the birds, and when they 
returned again I behaved better. 

By seven o'clock the birds had scattered, 
and we left our places to go back to the horse. 
On the way we encountered two hunters 
wandering rather disconsolately over the 
marsh. They stopped us to ask what luck, 
and we tried not to look too self-satisfied, but 
probably they read our success in our arro- 
gant faces, streaked with tar and sweet oil as 
they were. Possibly the bulge of our hunting- 
coat pockets helped to tell the story. 

"How long have you been out here.^^" they 
asked enviously. 

"Two hours or so," said Jonathan. 

"How'd you get out so early .^" 

"We got up early," said Jonathan, with 
admirable simplicity. 

The strangers looked at him twice to see if 
he meant to jeer, but he appeared impenetra- 
bly innocent, and they finally laughed, a little 
ruefully, and went on out into the marsh we 
were just leaving. Why does it make one feel 
so immeasurably superior to get up a few 
hours before other people? 



182 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

We drove home along the sunny road, 
where the bakers' carts and meat wagons 
were already astir. Could it be the same road 
that a few hours before had been so cold and 
gray and still? Were these bare white houses 
the same that had nestled so cozily into the 
dark of the roadside? We reached our own 
plain little white house and went in. In the 
dining-room our candles and the remains of 
our midnight breakfast on the table seemed 
like relics of some previous state of existence. 
Sleepily I set things in order for a real break- 
fast, a hot breakfast, a breakfast that should 
be cozy. Drowsily we ate, but contentedly. 
Everything since the night before seemed like 
a dream. 

It still seems so. But of all the dream the 
most vivid part — more vivid even than the 
alarm clock, more real than my tumble into 
wetness — is the vision that remains with me 
of mist-swept marsh, all gray and green and 
yellow, with tawny haycocks and glimmer- 
ings of water and whirrings of wings and whis- 
tling bird notes and the salt smell of the sea. 

Yes, Jonathan was right. Dawn hunting 
on the marshes is dififerent, quite diflEerent. 



XIV 

In the Wake of the Partridge 

*'The kangaroo ran very fast, 

I ran faster. 
The kangaroo was very fat, 

I ate him. 
Kangaroo! Kangaroo!" 

This, the hunting-song of the Australian 
Bushman, is the best one I know. Without 
disguise or adornment, it embodies the prim- 
itive hunting instinct that is in every one of 
us, whether we hunt people or animals or 
things or ideas. 

Jonathan and I do not habitually hunt 
kangaroos, and our hunting, or at any rate 
my share in it, is not as uniformly successful 
as the Bushman's seems to have been. For 
our own uses we should have to amend the song 
something as follows : — 

"The partridge-bird flew very fast, 

I missed him. 
The partridge-bird was very fat, 

I ate — chicken. 
Partridge-bird ! Partridge-bird ! " 

But we do not measure the success of our 



184 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

hunting by the size of our bag. The chase, 
the day out of doors, two or three birds at the 
most out of the dozen we flush, this is all that 
we ask. But then, we have a chicken-yard 
to fall back upon, which the Bushman had not. 
We sit before a blazing open fire, eating 
a hunter's breakfast — which means, nearly 
everything in the pantry. Coffee and toast are 
all very well for ordinary purposes, but they 
are poor things to carry you through a day's 
hunting, especially our kind of hunting. For 
a day's hunt with us is not an elaborate and 
well-planned affair. It does not mean a pre- 
arranged course over "preserved" territory, 
with a rendezvous at noon where the luncheon 
wagon comes, bringing out vast quantities of 
food, and taking home the morning's bag of 
game. It means a day's hunt that follows 
whither the birds lead, in a section of New 
England that is considered "hunted out," 
over ground sometimes familiar, sometimes 
wholly new, with no luncheon but a few 
crackers or a sandwich that has been stowed 
away in one of Jonathan's game pockets all 
the morning, and perhaps an apple or two, 
picked up in passing, from some old orchard 



IN THE WAKE OF THE PARTRIDGE 185 

now submerged in the woods — a hunt ending 
only when it is too dark to shoot, with per- 
haps a long tramp home again after that. No, 
coffee and toast would never do! 

As we turn out of the sheltered barnyard 
through the bars and up the farm lane, the 
keen wind flings at us, and our numb fingers 
recoil from the metal of our guns and take a 
careful grip on the wood. At once we fall to 
discussing the vital question — Where will 
the birds be to-day.^ For the partridges, as 
the New Englander calls our ruffed grouse, 
are very fastidious about where they spend 
their days. Sometimes they are all in the 
swamps, sometimes they are among the white 
birches of the hillsides, sometimes in the big 
woods, sometimes on the half-wooded rock 
ledges, sometimes among the scrub growth of 
lately cut timberland, and sometimes, in very 
cold weather, on the dry knolls where the 
cedars huddle — the warm little brooding 
cedars that give the birds shelter as a hen 
does her chicks. 

When I first began to hunt with Jonathan, 
he knew so much more than I in these matters 
that I always accepted his judgment. If he 



186 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

said, "To-day they will be in the swamps," I 
responded, "To the swamps let us go." But 
after a time I came to have opinions of my 
own, and then the era of discussion set in. 

"To-day," begins Jonathan judicially, 
"the wind is north, and the birds will be on 
the south slopes close to the swamp bottoms 
to keep warm." 

"Now, Jonathan, you know I don't a bit 
believe in going by the wind. The partridges 
don't mind wind, their feathers shed it. What 
they care about is the sun, and to-day the sun 
is hot, — at least," with a shiver, "it would 
be if we had feathers on instead of canvas. 
I believe we shall find them in the big 
woods." 

I usually advocate the big woods, because 
I like them best for a tramp. 

Jonathan, too well content at the prospect 
of a day's hunt to mind contradiction, says 
genially, "All right; I'll go wherever you 
say." 

Which always reduces me to terms at once. 
Above all things, I dislike to make myself an- 
swerable for the success or failure of the day. 
I prefer irresponsible criticism beforehand — 



, IN THE WAKE OF THE PARTRIDGE 187 

and afterwards. So I say hastily, "Oh, no, no! 
Of course you know a great deal more than I 
do. We'll go wherever you think best." 

"Well, perhaps it is too warm for the 
swamps to-day. Now, they might be in the 
birches." 

"Oh, dear! Don't let's go to the birches! 
The birds can't be there. They never are." 

"I thought we were going to go where I 
thought best." 

"Yes — but only not to the birches. It 's all 
a private myth of yours about their being 
there." 

"Is it a private myth of mine that you shot 
those two woodcock in the birches of the 
upper farm last year.^ And how about that 
big gray partridge — " 

"Well — of course — that was later in the 
season. I suppose the birds do eat birch buds 
when everything else gives out." 

And so I criticize, having agreed not to. 
But it's good for Jonathan; it makes him 
careful. 

"Well, shall it be the swamp.?" 

"No; if you really think they're in the 
birches, we'll go there. Besides, the swamp 



188 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

seems a little — chilly — to begiD with. Wait 
till I've seen a bird. Then I shan't mind so." 

"Then you do admit it's a cool morning?" 

"To paddle in a swamp, yes^ The birds 
don't have to paddle." 

We try the birches, and the pretty things 
whip our faces with their slender twigs in their 
own inimitable fashion, peculiarly trying to 
my temper. I can never go through birches 
long without growing captious. 

"Jonathan," I call, as I catch a glimpse of 
his hunting-coat through an opening, "I 
thought the birds were in the birches this 
morning. They don't seem really abundant." 

Jonathan, unruffled, suggests that I go 
along on the edge of the woods while he beats 
out the middle with the dog, which magnan- 
imous offer shames me into silent if not 
cheerful acquiescence. Suddenly — whr-r-r — 
something bursts away in the brush ahead of 
us. "Mark!" we both call, and, "Did you 
get his line.^" My critical spirit is stilled, and 
I am suddenly fired with the instinct to fol- 
low, follow! It is indeed a primitive instinct, 
this of the chase. No matter how tired one is, 
the impulse of pursuit is there. At the close of 



IN THE WAKE OF THE PARTRIDGE 189 

a long day's hunt, after fifteen miles or so of 
hard tramping, — equal to twice that of easy 
walking, — when my feet are heavy and my 
head dull, I have never seen a partridge fly 
without feeling ready, eager, to follow any- 
where. 

After we move the first bird, it is follow 
my leader ! And a wild leader he is. Flushed 
in the birches, he makes straight for the 
swamp. The swamp it is, then, and down we 
go after him, and in we go — ugh! how shivery 
the first plunge is — straight to the puddly 
heart of it, carefully keeping our direction. 
We go fast at first, then, when we have nearly 
covered the distance a partridge usually flies, 
we begin to slow down, holding back the too 
eager dog, listening for the snap of a twig or 
the sound of wings, gripping our guns tighter 
at every blue jay or robin that flicks across 
our path. No bird yet; we must have passed 
him; perhaps we went too far to the left. But 
no — whr-r-r! Where is he.^^ There! Out of 
the top of a tall swamp maple, off he goes, 
sailing over the swamp to the ridge beyond. 
No wonder the dog was at sea. Well — we 
know his line, we are oflf again after him in 



190 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

spite of the swamp between, with its mud and 
its rotten tree trunks and its grapevines and 
its cat briers. 

Up on the ridge at last, we hunt close, find 
him, get a shot, probably miss, and away we 
go again. Some hunters, used to a country 
where game is plenty, will not follow a bird if 
they miss him on the first rise. They prefer 
to keep on their predetermined course and 
find another. But for me there is little pleas- 
ure in that kind of sport. What I enjoy most 
is not shooting, but hunting. The chase is the 
thing — the chase after a particular bird once 
flushed, the setting of my wits against his in 
the endeavor to follow up his flight. We have 
now and then flushed the same bird nine or 
ten times before we got him — and we have 
not always got him then. For many and deep 
are the crafty ways of the old partridge, and 
we have not yet learned them all. That is 
why I like partridge-hunting better than 
quail or woodcock, though in these you get 
far more and better shooting. Quail start in a 
bunch, scatter, fly, and drop where you can 
flush them again, one at a time; w^oodcock 
fly in a zigzag, drop where they happen to, and 



IN THE WAKE OF THE PARTRIDGE 191 

sit still till you almost step on them. But the 
partridge thinks as he flies — thinks to good 
advantage. He seems to know what we expect 
him to do, and then he does something else. 
How many times have we gone past him when 
he sat quietly between us, and then heard 
him fly off stealthily down our back track! 
How often, in a last desperate search for a 
vanished bird, have I jumped on every felled 
cedar top in a field — except the one he was 
under! How often have I broken open my 
gun to climb a stone wall, — for we are cau- 
tious folk, Jonathan and I, — and, as I stood 
in perilous balance, seen a great bird burst 
out from under my very feet ! How often — 
but I am not going to be tempted into telling 
hunting-stories. For some reason or other, 
hunting-stories chiefly interest the narrator. 
I have watched sportsmen telling tales in the 
evenings, and noted how every man but the 
speaker grows restive as he watches for a 
chance to get in his own favorite yarn. 

And it is not the partridges alone with whom 
we grow acquainted. We have glimpses, too, 
of the other outdoor creatures. The life of the 
woods slips away from us as we pass, but only 



192 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

just out of sight, and not always that. The 
blue jays scream in the tree-tops, oJSSciously 
proclaiming us to the woods; the chickadees, 
who must see all that goes on, hop close beside 
us in the bushes; the gray squirrel dodges 
behind a tree trunk with just the corner of an 
eye peering at us around it. The chipmunk 
darts into the stone wall, and doubtless looks 
at us from its safe depths; the rabbit gallops 
off from the brier tangle or the brush heap, or 
sits up, round-eyed, thinking, little silly, that 
we don't see him. Once I saw a beautiful red 
fox who leaped into the open for a moment, 
stood poised, and leaped on into the brush; 
and once, as I sat resting, a woodchuck, big 
and uncombed, hustled busily past me, so 
close I could have touched him. He did not 
see me, and seemed so preoccupied with some 
pressing business that I should hardly have 
been surprised to see him pull a watch out of 
his pocket, like Alice's rabbit, and mutter, *'I 
shall be late." I had not known that the wood 
creatures ever felt hurried except when pur- 
sued. Another time I was working up the 
slope on the sunny edge of a run, and, as I 
drew myself up over the edge of a big rock, I 



IN THE WAKE OF THE PARTRIDGE 193 

found myself face to face — nose to nose — 
with a calm, mild-eyed, cottontail rabbit. He 
did not remain calm; in fact, we were both 
startled, but he recovered first, and hopped 
softly over the side of the rock, and went gal- 
loping away through the brushy bottom, while 
I, still kneeling, watched him disappear just 
as Jonathan came up. 

"What's the joke.?" 

"Nothing, only I just met a rabbit. He 
sat here, right here, and he was so rabbit-y ! 
He looked at me just like an Easter card." 

"Why did n't you shoot him.?" 

"I never thought of it. I wish you had 
seen how his nose twiddled! And, anyhow, 
I would n't shoot anything sitting up that 
way, like a tame kitten." 

"Then why did n't you shoot when he 
ran.?" 

"Shoot a rabbit running! Running in scal- 
lops! I could n't." 

The fact is, I should n't shoot a rabbit any- 
way, unless driven by hunger. I am not hu- 
mane, but merely sentimental about them 
because they are soft and pretty. Once, in- 
deed, when I found all my beautiful heads of 



194 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

lettuce neatly nibbled off down to the central 
stalks, I almost hardened my heart against 
them, but the next time I met one of the little 
fellows I forgave him all. 

I believe that one of the very best things 
about our way of following a partridge is the 
sense of intimacy with the countryside which 
it creates — an intimacy which nothing else 
has ever given us. In most outdoor faring 
one sticks to the roads and paths, in fishing one 
keeps to the water-courses, in cross-country 
tramping one unconsciously goes around 
obstacles. Nothing but the headlong and 
undeviating pursuit of a bird along a path of 
his choosing would ever have given me that 
acquaintance with ledge and swamp and laurel 
copse that I now possess. I know our swamp 
as a hippopotamus might, or — to stick to 
plain Yankee creatures — a mud turtle. It is 
a very swampy swamp, with spring holes and 
channels and great shallow pools where the 
leaves from the tall swamp maples — scarlet 
and rose and ashes of roses — sift slowly down 
and float until they sink into the leaf mould 
beneath. I have favorite paths through it as 
the squirrels have in the tree-tops; I know 



IN THE WAKE OF THE PARTRIDGE 195 

where the mud is too deep to venture, where 
the sprawling, moss-covered roots of the 
maples offer grateful support; I know the 
brushy edges where the blossoming witch- 
hazel fills the air with its quaint fragrance; I 
know the sunny, open places where the tufted 
ferns, shoulder high, and tawny gold after the 
early frosts, give insecure but welcome foot- 
ing; I know — too well indeed — the thickets 
of black alder that close in about me and tug 
at my gun and drive me to fury. 

Yes, we know that swamp, and other 
swamps only less well. We know the rock 
ledges, the big dry woods of oak and chest- 
nut and maple and beech. We know the 
ravines where the great hemlocks keep the air 
always dim and still, and one goes silent- 
footed over the needle floor. We grow familiar, 
too, with all the little things about the coun- 
try. We discover new haunts of the fringed 
gentian, the wonderful, the capricious, with 
its unbelievable blue that one sees nowhere 
else save under the black lashes of some Irish 
eyes. We find the shy spring orchids, gone to 
seed now, but we remember and seek them 
out again next May. We surprise the spring 



196 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

flowers in their rare fall blossoming — violets 
white and blue in the warm, moist bottom- 
lands, sand violets on the dry knolls, daisies, 
hepaticas, buttercups, and anemones — I 
have seen all these in a single day in raw 
November. We learn where the biggest chest- 
nuts grow — great silky brown fellows almost 
twice the size of Jonathan's thumb. We dis- 
cover old landmarks in the deep woods, sur- 
veyors' posts, a heap of stones carefully piled 
on a big rock. We find old clearings, over- 
grown now, but our feet still feel underneath 
the weeds the furrows left by the plow. Now 
and then we come upon a spot where once 
there must have been a home. There is no 
house, no timbers even, but the stone cellar is 
not wholly obliterated, and the gnarled lilac- 
bush and the apple tree stubbornly cling to a 
worn-out life amidst the forest of young white 
oaks and chestnuts that has closed in about 
them. Once we came upon a little group of 
gravestones, only three or four, sunken in the 
ground and so overgrown and weather-worn 
that we could read nothing. There was no 
sign of a human habitation, but I suppose 
they must have been placed there in the old 



IN THE WAKE OF THE PARTRIDGE 197 

days when the family burial-ground was in 
one corner of the farm itself. 

We learn to know where the springs of pure 
water are, welling up out of the deep ground 
in a tiny pool under some big rock or between 
the roots of a great yellow birch tree. And 
when the sun shines hot at noon, and a lost 
trail and a vanished bird leave us to the sud- 
den realization that we are tired and thirsty, 
we know where is the nearest water. We 
know, too, the knack of drinking so as not to 
swallow the little gnats that skim its surface 
— you must blow them back ever so gently, 
and drink before they close in again. How 
good it tastes as we lie at full length on the 
matted brown leaves ! How good the crackers 
taste, too, and the crisp apples, as we sit by 
the spring and rest, and talk over the morn- 
ing's hunt and plan the afternoon's — subject 
to the caprices of the birds. 

But I suppose the very best about hunting 
can never be told at all. That is true of any 
really good thing, and there is nothing better 
than a long day after the birds. It is always 
good to be out of doors. And there are seasons 
when one is glad to wander slowly over the 



198 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

fields and byways; there are times when it 
seems best of all to be still — in the heart of 
the woods, on the wide hill pastures, in the 
deep grass of the meadows. But not in the 
fall! Is it a breath of the migrating instinct 
that makes us want to be oflf and away, to go, 
and go, and go? Yes, fall is the time for the 
hunt — gay, boisterous fall, rioting in wind 
and color to keep up its spirits against the 
stealthy approach of winter. And whether we 
shoot well or ill, whether our game pockets are 
heavy or light, no matter what the weather 
we find or the country we cross, it is all good 
hunting, very good. And at night we come in 
to a blazing fire, feeling tired, oh, so tired ! and 
hungry, oh, so hungry! and with soul and 
body shriven clean by wind and sun. 



XV 

Beyond the Realm of Weather 

Our friends say to us now and then, "But 
why must you do these things with a gun? 
Why can't you do the same things and leave 
the gun at home?" Why, indeed? When I 
put this question to Jonathan, he smokes on 
placidly. But of one thing I am sure: if it had 
not been for the guns and the ducks, I should 
never have known what the marshes were like 
in winter fog — what they were like under a 
winter sky with a wind straight from the North 
Pole sweeping over their bare stretches. 

It was early afternoon. Through the study 
window I looked out upon a raw, foggy world, 
melting snow underfoot and overhead. It 
was the kind of day about which even the 
most deliberately cheerful can find little to say 
except that this sort of thing can't last forever, 
you know. However, if I had had a true in- 
stinct for "nature," I should, I suppose, have 
seen at a glance that it was just the day to go 



200 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

and lie in a marsh. But this did not occur to 
me. Instead, I thought of open fires, and pop- 
corn, and hot peanuts, and novels, and fudge, 
and other such things, which are supposed to 
be valuable as palHatives on days like these. 

The telephone rang. "Oh, it's you, Jona- 
than! . . . What.f^ No, not really! You 
wouldn't! . . . Well, if the ducks like it, 
they may have it all. I'm not a duck. . . . 
Why, of course, if you really want me to, I '11 
go, only ... All right, I'll get out the 
things. . . . Three o'clock train.^^ You'll 
have to hurry!" 

I hung up the receiver and sat a moment, 
dazed, looking out at the reek of weather. 
Then I shook myself and darted upstairs to 
the hunting-closet. In half an hour the bag 
was packed and Jonathan was at the door. 
In an hour we were on the train, and at twi- 
light we were tramping out into a fog-swept 
marsh. Grayness was all around us; under- 
foot was mud, glimmering patches of soft 
snow, and the bristly stubble of the close-cut 
marsh grass. 

"What fools we are!" I murmured. 

"Why.^" said Jonathan contentedly. 



; BEYOND THE REALM OF WEATHER 201 

"Oh, if you can't see — " I said. 

And then, suddenly, as we walked, my 
whole attitude changed. The weather, as 
weather, seemed something that belonged in 
a city — very far away, and no concern of 
mine. This was n't weather, here where we 
walked; it was a gray and boundless world of 
mystery. We raised our heads high and 
breathed long, deep breaths as the fog drifted 
against our faces. We were aware of dim 
masses of huddling bushes, blurred outlines 
of sheds and fences. Then only the level 
marsh stretched out before us and around us. 

"Can we find our way out again?" I mur- 
mured, though without real anxiety. 

"Probably," said Jonathan. "Isn't it 
great ! You feel as if you had a soul out here ! 
By the way, what was it you said about 
fools.?" 

"I forget," I said. 

We went on and on, I don't know just 
where or how long, until we came to the creek, 
where the tide sets in and out. I should have 
walked into it if Jonathan had n't held me 
back. As we followed it, there rose a hoarse, 
raucous ''Ngwak ! ngwak 1 ngwak I " and a great 



202 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

rush of wings. Jonathan dropped on one 
knee, gun up, but we saw nothing. 

"We'll settle down here," he said. "There'll 
be more coming in soon. Wait a minute — 
hold my gun." He disappeared in the fog, 
and came back with an armful of hay, taken 
from the heart of a haystack of whose exist- 
ence he seemed, by some sixth or seventh 
sense, to be aware. "There! That'll keep 
you oflf the real marsh. Now settle down, and 
don't move, and listen with all your ears, and 
be ready. I'll go off a little way." 

I sank down on the hay, and watched him 
melt into the grayness. I was alone in the dim 
marsh. There was no wind, no sound but the 
far-off whistle and rush of a train. I lay there 
and thought of nothing. I let myself be ab- 
sorbed into the twilight. I did not even feel 
that I had a soul. I was nothing but a point of 
consciousness in the midst of a gray infinity. 

Suddenly I was aware of a sound — a rapid 
pulsing of soft, high tone — too soft for a 
whistle, too high for a song, — pervasive, elus- 
ive; it was overhead, it was beside me, behind 
me, where? Ah — it was wings! The winnowing 
of wings! I half rose, grasping my gun, with 



BEYOND THE REALM OF WEATHER 203 

a sense of responsibility to Jonathan. But my 
vision was caught in the grayness as in a web. 
The sound grew clearer, then fainter, then it 
passed away. The twilight gathered, and the 
fog partly dissolved. A fine rain began to fall, 
and in the intense silence I could hear the faint 
pricking of the drops on the stiff marsh stub- 
ble. I had thought the patter of rain on a roof 
was the stillest sound I knew, but this was 
stiller. Again came the winnowing of wings — 
again and again; and sometimes I was able to 
see the dark shapes passing overhead and 
vanishing almost before they appeared. Now 
and then I heard the muffled, flat sound of 
Jonathan's gun — he was evidently living up 
to his opportunities better than I was. Oc- 
casionally, in a spasm of activity, I shot 
too. 

Until night closed in about us that sound of 
wings filled the air, and I knelt, listening and 
watching. It is strange how one can be phys- 
ically alert while yet one's soul is withdrawn, 
quiet and receptive. Out of this state, as out 
of a trance, I was roused by the sense of Jona- 
than's dim bulk, seeming "larger than mor- 
tal, " as he emerged from the night. 



204 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

"Cold?" he said. 

'*I don't know — no, of course I'm not." 
I found it hard to lay hold on clear ideas 
again. 

"I heard you shoot. Get any .^ " 
"I think I hurried them a little." 
We started back. At least I suppose it was 
back, because after a while we came to the 
road we had left. I was conscious only of be- 
wildering patches of snow that lay like half- 
veiled moonlight on the dark stretches of the 
marsh. At last a clump of cedars made them- 
selves felt rather than seen. ''There's the 
fence corner ! We 're all right," said Jonathan. 
A snow-filled horse rut gave faint guidance, the 
twigs of the hedgerow lightly felt of our faces 
as we passed. We found the main road, and it 
led us through the quiet, fog-bound village, 
whose house lights made tiny blurs on the 
mist, to the hot, bright little station. Then 
came the close, flaringly lighted car, and 
people — commuters — getting on and off, 
talking about the ''weather," and filling the 
car with the smell of wet newspapers and um- 
brellas. We had returned to the land of 
"weather." Yet it did not really touch us. It 



BEYOND THE REALM OF WEATHER 205 

seemed a dream. The reality was the marsh, 
with its fog and its pricking raindrops and its 
sentinel cedars, its silence and its wings. 

In the days that followed, the fog passed, 
and there were long, warm rains. The marsh 
called us, but we could not go. Then the sky 
cleared, the wind rose, the mercury began to 
drop. Jonathan looked across the luncheon 
table and said, "What about ducks .^" 

*'Can you get off ?" I asked joyously. 

*'I can't, but I will," he replied. 

And this time — Did I think I knew the 
marsh? Did I suppose, having seen it at dawn 
in the fall days when the sun still rises early, 
having seen it in winter twilight, fog-beset, 
that I knew it.^ Do I suppose I know it now.^ 
At least I know it better, having seen it under 
a clearing sky, when the cold wind sweeps it 
clean, and the air, crystalline, seems like a lens 
through which one looks and sees a revelation 
of new things. 

As we struck into the marsh, just at sun- 
down, my first thought was a rushing prayer 
for words, for colors, for something to catch 
and hold the beauty of it. But there are no 
words, no colors. No one who has not seen 



206 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

it can know what a New England shore marsh 
can be in winter under a golden sky. 

Winter does some things for us that sum- 
mer cannot do. Summer gives us everything 
all at once — color, fragrance, line, sound — 
in an overwhelming exuberance of riches. 
And it is good. But winter — Ah, winter is 
an artist, winter has reserves; he selects, he 
emphasizes, he interprets. Winter says, "I will 
give you nothing to-day but brown and white, 
but I will glorify these until you shall wonder 
that there can be any beauty except thus." 
And again winter says: "Did you think the 
world was brown and white .^ Lo, it is blue 
and rose and silver — nothing else!" And we 
look, and it is so. On that other evening, in 
the fog, the world had been all gray — black- 
gray and pale gray and silver gray. On this 
evening winter said: " Gray.^^ Not at all. You 
shall have brown and gold. Behold and mar- 
vel!" 

I marveled. There was a sweep of golden 
marsh, under a gold sky, and at its borders 
low lines of trees etched in rich brown masses, 
and my sentinel cedars standing singly or by 
twos and threes — cedars in their winter 



BEYOND THE REALM OF WEATHER 207 

tones of olive brown, dull almost to harshness, 
holding themselves stiffly against the great 
wind, yielding only at their delicate tips 
when the gusts came, recovering again in the 
lulls, to point dauntlessly skyward. The nar- 
row boundary ditches, already glassing over 
in the sudden cold, stretched away in rigid 
lines, flashing back the light of the sky in 
shivers of gold. The haystacks reiterated the 
color notes — gold on their sunset side, deep 
brown on their shadowed one. 

There is a moment sometimes, just at sun- 
down, when the quality of light changes. It 
does not fall upon the world from without, it 
radiates from within. Things seem self-lum- 
inous. Yet, for all their brightness, we see 
them less clearly, one's vision is dazzled, 
enmeshed. It is the time when that wondrous 
old word "faerie" finds its meaning. It is a 
magic moment. It laid its spell upon us. 

Jonathan emerged first, bracing himself. 
'*It will shut down soon. We haven't a 
minute to spare. We ought to be on the creek 
now." 

It was hard to believe that such brightness 
could ever shut down. But it did. By the time 



208 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

we reached the creek the gold had vanished, 
except for a narrow Hne in the western sky. 
The world lay in clear, brown twilight, and the 
wind swept over it. 

Jonathan got more hay, and this time I saw 
the haystack from which he plucked it. I 
threw myself on it, collar up, cap down, lying 
as low as possible. 

''Bad night for ducks, of course," growled 
Jonathan. "If only the thaw had held twelve 
hours more! However — " 

He swung off to some chosen spot of his 
own. 

I lay there and the wind surged over me. 
There was nothing to stop it, nothing to make 
it noisy. It sang a little around the flap of my 
coat, it swished a little in the short marsh 
grass, but chiefly it rushed by above me, in 
invisible, soundless might. It seemed as if it 
must come between me and the stars, but it 
did not, and I watched them appear, at first 
one by one, then in companies and cohorts, 
until the sky was powdered with them. Now 
and then a dark line of ducks streamed over 
me, high up, in direct, steady flight, but the 
sound of their wings was swallowed up by the 



BEYOND THE REALM OF WEATHER 209 

wind. I did not even try to shoot; I was try- 
ing to find myself in an elemental world that 
seemed bigger and more powerful than I had 
ever conceived it. 

Gradually I realized that I was cold. The 
wind seemed suddenly to have become aware 
of me. It roared down upon me, it shook me, 
worried me, let me go, and pounced upon me 
again in the sport of power. I said to myself, 
"I cannot resist, I will give myself up to it 
absolutely." I stopped feeling cold. I was 
no more than a ship's timber lying on the 
shore — with just a centre, a point of con- 
sciousness somewhere inside, to be aware of 
the difference between the elements and the 
something I knew was myself. 

But at last I moved. It was fatal. A wave 
of cold started, pricking somewhere in my 
head, and undulated sinuously through me, 
down to my feet. More waves followed; they 
careered through me. I considered them with 
interest. Then they settled into aches at all 
the extremities. All at once it ceased to be 
interesting, and became a personal grievance 
— against the wind? the ducks? No — Jona- 
than! Of course it was Jonathan's fault. Why 



210 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

did n't he come? I gazed into the twilight 
where he had disappeared. I could n't go and 
hunt for him, because I should certainly get 
lost or fall into a ditch. Ah! What was that.'^ 
The long red flash of a gun! — another! — 
then the double report! Well, of course, if he 
were shooting, I would suspend judgment a 
reasonable time. 

But it seemed quite an unreasonable time 
before I felt the impact of his tread on the 
springy marsh floor. I rose stiffly, feeling 
cross. 

"Did you think I was never coming.^" 

"I can't think. My brains are stiff." 

"I was delayed. I dropped one in the ditch. 
He was only wounded. I could n't leave him." 

"Then you got some?" 

"Feel!" 

I felt his game pockets. "One, two — oh, 
three ! I did n't hear you shoot except twice. 
Well " — I was stamping and flinging my 
arms around myself in the endeavor to thaw 
out — "I think they're very well off: they're 
bound for a warm oven." 

"Cold? Thunder! I ought to have left 
you the bottle. Here!" 



BEYOND THE REALM OF WEATHER 211 

I took it and gulped, protesting: "Detest- 
able stuff! Wait, I'll take some more." 

"This from you! You must he cold I Come 
on! Run! Look out for the little ditches! 
Jump where I do." 

We started stiffly enough, in the teeth of 
the big, dark wind, till the motion, and the 
bottle, began to take effect. A haymow 
loomed. We flung ourselves, panting, against 
it, and, sinking back into its yielding bulk, 
drew long breaths. 

"Did we think it was cold ?" I murmured; 
"or windy.?" 

We were on the leeward side of it, and it 
gave generous shelter. The wind sighed gently 
over the top of the mow, breathed past its 
sides, never touching us, and we gazed up at 
the stars. 

"The sky is fairly gray with them," I said. 

"Perhaps," said Jonathan lazily, "it's that 
bottle, making you see ten stars grow where 
one grew before." 

"Perhaps," I suggested, choosing to ignore 
this speech, "it's the wind, blowing the stars 
around and raising star-dust." 

We lay in our protecting mow, and the 



212 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

warmth of our bodies drew out of it faint odors 
of salt hay. We did not talk. There are times 
when one seems to exist in poise, with etern- 
ity on all sides. One's thoughts do not move, 
they float. 

"Well.^" said Jonathan at last. 

I could hear the hay rustle as he straight- 
ened up. 

"Don't interrupt," I answered. 

But my spirit had come down to earth, and 
after the first jolt I realized that, as usual, 
Jonathan was right. 

We plunged out again into the buflFeting 
wind and the starlit darkness, and I followed 
blindly as Jonathan led across the marshes, 
around pools, over ditches, until we began to 
see the friendly twinkle of house lights on the 
edge of the village. On through the lanes to 
the highroad, stumbling now and then on its 
stiffened ruts and ridges. As houses thickened 
the gale grew noisy, singing in telphone wires, 
whistling around barn corners, slamming 
blinds and doors, and rushing in the tree-tops. 

"O for that haymow!" I gasped. 

''The open fire will be better." Jonathan 
flung back comfort across the wind. 



BEYOND THE REALM OF WEATHER 213 

Ten minutes later we had made harbor in 
the Httle house by the shore. The candles 
were lighted, the fire set ablaze, and as we sat 
before it cooking chops and toast I said, "No, 
Jonathan, the open fire is n't any better than 
the haymow." 

''But different.^" he suggested. 

"Yes, quite different." 

"And good in its own poor way.'* 

He turned his chop. Chops and toast and 
a blazing jBre give forth odors of distracting 
pleasantness under such circumstances. 

"I think," I said, "that each gives point 
to the other." 

"Are n't you glad I took you for ducks.'^" 
he asked. 

I mused, watching my toast. "I suppose," 
I said, "no one in his senses would leave a 
comfortable city house to go and lie out in a 
marsh at night, in a forty-mile gale, with the 
mercury at ten, unless he had some other mo- 
tive than the thing itself — ducks, or conspir- 
acy, or something. And yet it is the thing 
itself that is the real reward." 

"Is n't that true of almost everything.?" 
said Jonathan. 



XVI 

Comfortable Books 

Jonathan methodically tucked his bookmark 
into "The Virginians," and, closing the fat 
green volume, began to knock the ashes out 
of his pipe against the bricked sides of the 
fireplace. 

'"The Virginians' is a very comfortable 
sort of book," he remarked. 

"Is it?" I said. "I wonder why." 

He ruminated. "Well, chiefly, I suppose, 
because it's so good and long. You get to 
know all the people, you get used to their 
ways, and when they turn up again, after a 
lot of chapters, you don't have to find out who 
they are — you just feel comfortably ac- 
quainted." 

I sighed. I had just finished a magazine 
story — condensed, vivid, crushing a whole 
life-tragedy into seven pages and a half. In 
that space I had been made acquainted with 
sixteen different characters, seven principal 



COMFORTABLE BOOKS 215 

ones and the rest subordinate, but all clearly 
drawn. I had found it interesting, stimulating; 
as a tour de force it was noteworthy even 
among the crowd of short-stories — all con- 
densed, all vivid, all interesting — that had 
appeared that month. But — comfortable? 
No. And I felt envious of Jonathan. He had 
been reading '' The Virginians " all winter. 
His bookmark was at page 597, and there 
were 803 pages in all, so he had a great deal 
of comfort left. 

Perhaps comfort is not quite all that one 
should expect from one's reading. Certainly 
it is the last thing one gets from the perusal 
of our current literature, and any one who 
reads nothing else is missing something which, 
whether he realizes it or not, he ought for his 
soul's sake to have — something which Jona- 
than roughly indicated when he called it 
"comfort." The ordinary reader devours 
short-stories by the dozen, by the score — 
short short-stories, long short-stories, even 
short-stories laboriously expanded to a vol- 
ume, but still short-stories. He glances, less 
frequently, at verses, chiefly quatrains, at col- 
umns of jokes, at popularized bits of history 



216 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

and science, at bits of anecdotal biography, 
and nowhere in all this medley does he come 
in contact with what is large and leisurely. 
Current literature is like a garden I once saw. 
Its proud owner led me through a maze of 
smooth-trodden paths, and pointed out a vast 
number of horticultural achievements. There 
were sixty-seven varieties of dahlias, there 
were more than a hundred kinds of roses, 
there were untold wonders which at last my 
weary brain refused to record. Finally I 
escaped, exhausted, and sought refuge on a 
hillside I knew, from which I could look across 
the billowing green of a great rye-field, and 
there, given up to the beauty of its mani- 
fold simplicity, I invited my soul. 

It is even so with our reading. When I go 
into one of our public reading-rooms, and 
survey the serried ranks of magazines and the 
long shelves full of "Recent fiction, not to be 
taken out for more than five days," — nay, 
even when I look at the library tables of some 
of my friends, — my brain grows sick and I 
long for my rye-field. 

Happily, there always is a rye-field at hand 
to be had for the seeking. Jonathan finds re- 



COMFORTABLE BOOKS 217 

fuge from business and the newspapers in his 
pipe and "The Virginians." I have no pipe, 
but I sit under the curhng rings of Jonathan's, 
and I, too, have my comfortable books, my 
literary rye-fields. Last summer it was Mal- 
ory's "Morte d'Arthur," whose book I found 
indeed a comfortable one — most comfortable. 
I read much besides, many short stories of 
surpassing cleverness and some of real excel- 
lence, but as I look back upon my summer's 
literary experience, all else gives place to the 
long pageant of Malory's story, gorgeous or 
tender or gay, seen like a fair vision against 
the dim background of an old New England 
apple orchard. Surely, though the literature 
of our library tables may sometimes weary 
me, it shall never enslave me. 

But they must be read, these "comfortable" 
books, in the proper fashion, not hastily, 
nor cursorily, nor with any desire to "get 
on" in them. They must lie at our hand to be 
taken up in moments of leisure, the slowly 
shifting bookmark — there should always be 
a bookmark — recording our half-reluctant 
progress. (I remember with what dismay I 
found myself arrived at the fourth and last 



218 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

volume of Malory.) Thus read, thus slowly 
woven among the intricacies and distractions 
of our life, these precious books will link its 
quiet moments together and lend to it a cer- 
tain quality of largeness, of deliberation, of 
continuity. 

For it is surely a mistake to assume, as 
people so often do, that in a life full of dis- 
tractions one should read only such things as 
can be finished at a single sitting and that a 
short one. It is a great misfortune to read 
only books that "must be returned within 
five days." For my part, I should like to see 
in our public libraries, to oflFset the shelves of 
such books, other shelves, labeled ''Books 
that may and should be kept out six months." 
I would have there Thackeray and George 
Eliot and Wordsworth and Spenser, Malory 
and Homer and Cervantes and Shakespeare 
and Montaigne — oh, they should be shelves 
to rejoice the soul of the harassed reader ! 

No, if one can read but little, let him by all 
means read something big. I know a woman 
occupied with the demands of a peculiarly 
exigent social position. Finding her one day 
reading "The Tempest," I remarked on her 



COMFORTABLE BOOKS 219 

enterprise. "Not a bit!" she protested. "I 
am not reading it to be enterprising, I am 
reading it to get rested. I find Shakespeare 
so peaceful, compared with the magazines." 
I have another friend who is taking entire 
charge of her children, besides doing a good 
deal of her own housework and gardening. 
I discovered her one day sitting under a tree, 
reading Matthew Arnold's poems, while the 
children played near by. I ventured to com- 
ment on what seemed to me the incongruity 
of her choice of a book. " But don't you see," 
she replied, quickly. ''Thatis just why! lam 
so busy from minute to minute doing lots of 
little practical, temporary things, that I sim- 
ply have to keep in touch with something 
different — something large and quiet. If I 
didn't, I should die!" 

I suppose in the old days, in a less "liter- 
ary" age, all such busy folk found this nec- 
essary rest and refreshment in a single book 
— the Bible. Doubtless many still do so, but 
not so many; and this, quite irrespective of 
religious considerations, seems to me a great 
pity. The literary quality of the Scriptures 
has, to be sure, been partly vitiated by the 



220 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

lamentable habit of reading them in isolated 
"texts," instead of as magnificent wholes; 
yet, even so, I feel sure that this constant in- 
tercourse with the Book did for our pre- 
decessors in far larger measure what some 
of these other books of which I have been 
speaking do for us — it furnished that contact 
with greatness which we all crave. 

It may be accident, though I hardly think 
so, that to find such books we must turn to 
the past. Doubtless others will arise in the 
future — possibly some are even now being 
brought to birth, though this I find hard to 
believe. For ours is the age of the short-story 
— a wonderful product, perhaps the finest 
flower of fiction, and one which has not yet 
achieved all its victories or realized all its 
possibilities. All the fiction of the future will 
show the influence of this highly specialized 
form. In sheer craftsmanship, novel-writing 
has progressed far; in technique, in dexterous 
manipulation of their material, the novices of 
to-day are ahead of the masters of yesterday. 
This often happens in an art, and it is espe- 
cially true just now in the art of fiction. Yes, 
there are great things preparing for us in the 



COMFORTABLE BOOEB 221 

future, there are excellent things being done 
momently about us. But while we wait for 
the great ones, the excellent ones sometimes 
create in us a sense of surfeit. We cannot 
hurry the future, and if meanwhile we crave 
repose, leisure, quiet, steadiness, the sense of 
magnitude, we must go to the past. There, 
and not in the yearly output of our own 
publishers, we shall find our ''comfortable" 
books. 



XVII 

In the Firelight 

Jonathan had improvidently lighted his pipe 
before he noticed that the fire needed his at- 
tention. This was a mistake, because, at least 
in Jonathan's case, neither a fire nor a pipe 
responds heartily to a divided mind. As I 
watched him absently knocking the charred 
logs together, I longed to snatch the tongs 
from his indifferent hands and "change the 
sorry scheme of things entire." Big wads of 
smoke rolled nonchalantly out of the corners 
of the fireplace and filled the low ceiling with 
bluish mist, yet I held my peace, and I did 
not snatch the tongs. I know of no circum- 
stances wherein advice is less welcome than 
when offered by a woman to a man on his 
knees before the fire. When my friends make 
fudge or rare-bits, they invite criticism, they 
court suggestion, but when one of them takes 
the tongs in his hand, have a care what you 
say to him! In our household a certain con- 



IN THE FIRELIGHT 223 

vention of courtesy — fireplace etiquette — 
has tacitly established itself, in accordance 
with which the person who wields the tongs, 
assuming full responsibility for results, is free 
from criticism or suggestion. Disregard of 
such etiquette may not have precipitated 
divorce, but I have known it to produce dis- 
tinctly strained relations. And so, while 
Jonathan tinkered in a half-hearted way 
at the fire, I ruled my tongue. At last, lit- 
tle vanishing blue flickers began to run 
along the log edges, growing steadier and 
yellower until they settled into something 
like a blaze. 

Jonathan straightened up, but there was a 
trace of the apologetic in his tone as he said, 
"That'll do, won't it.^" 

"Why, yes," I replied cautiously, "it's a 
fire." 

"Well, what's the matter with it .'^" he asked 
tolerantly. 

"Since you press me, I should say that it 
lacks — style." 

Jonathan leaned back, puffing comfortably 
— "Now, what in thunder do you mean by 
style? "^ 



224 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

But I was not to be enticed into an empty 
discussion of terms. ** Well, then, say frowsy. 
Call it a frowsy fire. You know what frowsy 
means, I suppose. Of course, though, I don't 
mean to criticize, only you asked me." And I 
added, with perhaps unnecessary blandness, 
''I'm warm enough." 

Jonathan smoked a few moments more, 
possibly by way of establishing his independ- 
ence, then slowly rose, remarking, "Oh, 
well, if you want a stylish fire — " 

''I did n't say stylish, I said style — " 

But he was gone. He must have journeyed 
out to the woodshed, — however, there was a 
moon, — for he returned bearing a huge 
backlog. He had been magnanimous, indeed, 
for it was the sort that above all others delights 
my heart — a forked apple log with a big 
hollow heart. In a moment, I was on my 
knees clearing a place for it, and he swung it 
into position on the bed of embers, tucked in 
some white birch in front, and soon the flames 
were licking about the flaking gray apple bark 
and shooting up through the hollow fork in a 
fashion to charm the most fastidious. 

People whose open fires are machine-fed 



IN THE FIRELIGHT 225 

— who arrange for their wood as they do for 
their groceries, by telephone — know little 
of the real joys of a fire. It is laid by a serv- 
ant, — unintelligently laid, — and upon such 
masses of newspaper and split kindling that it 
has no choice but to burn. The match is 
struck, the newspapers flare up, and soon there 
is a big, meaningless blaze. Handfuls of 
wood — just wood, any kind of wood — are 
thrown on from time to time, and perhaps a 
log or two — any log, taken at random from 
the woodbox. Truly, this is merest savagery, 
untrained, undiscriminating; it is the Bush- 
man's meal compared to the Frenchman's 
dinner. Not thus are real hearth fires laid. 
Not thus are they enjoyed. You should plan 
a fire as you do a dinner party, and your 
wood, like your people, should be selected and 
arranged with due regard to age, tempera- 
ment, and individual eccentricity. A fire thus 
skillfully planned, with some good talkers 
among the logs, may be as well worth listen- 
ing to as the conversation about your table — 
perhaps better. 

To get the full flavor of a fire you must 
know your wood — I had almost said, you 



226 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

must remember where the tree stood before it 
was cut — white birch in the dry, w orn-out 
slopes, black birches from the edges of the 
pasture lots, chestnut from the ledges, maple 
from the swamps, apple from the old orchard, 
oak cut in sorrow when the fullness of time 
has come, and burned with the honor due to 
royalty. 

But though this may be a refinement of 
fancy, it is no fancy that one kind of wood dif- 
fers from another in glory. There is the white 
birch, gay, light-hearted, volatile, putting all 
its pretty self into a few flaring moments — 
a butterfly existence. There is black birch, 
reluctant but steady; there is chestnut, viva- 
cious, full of sudden enthusiasms; the apple, 
cheerful and willing; the maple and oak, sober 
and stanch, good for the long pull. Every 
locality has its own sorts of wood, as its own 
sorts of people. Mine is a New England wood 
basket, and as I look at it I recognize all my 
old friends. Of them all I love the apple best, 
yet each is in its own way good. For a quick 
blaze, throw on the white birch; for a long 
evening of reading, when one does not want 
distraction, pile on the oak and maple. They 



IN THE FIRELIGHT 227 

will burn quietly, unobtrusively, importun- 
ing you neither for care nor appreciation. But 
for a fire to sit before with friends, bring in the 
apple wood. Lay the great backlog, the more 
gnarled the better, and if there is a hole 
through which the flames may shoot up, that 
is best of all — such logs we hoard for special 
occasions. Then with careful touch arrange 
the wood in front, your bundles of twigs, 
your pretty white birch sticks and your dry 
chestnut to start the fun, then the big apple 
forelog, the forestick and the backstick, 
not too much crowding or too much space. 
Ah, there is a seemly fire! There is a fire for 
friends ! 

For the renewal of old friendships, as for 
the perfecting of new ones, there is nothing 
like a fire. I met a friend after years of separ- 
ation. We came together in a modern house, 
just modern enough to be full of steam pipes 
and registers and gas-logs, but not so modern as 
to have readopted open fireplaces. The room 
had no centre — there was no hearth to draw 
around, there was no reason for sitting in one 
place rather than another. We could not 
draw around the steam pipes or the register. 



228 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

The gas-log was not turned on, it would have 
been too hot, and anyhow — a gas-log ! We 
sat and talked for hours in an aimless, unsat- 
isfactory sort of way. I felt as if we were, 
figuratively speaking, sitting on the edges of 
our chairs. It was better than nothing, but it 
was not a real meeting. The next year we 
were together again, but this time it was before 
our own blazing apple log. We did not talk so 
much as we had done before, but we were 
silent a great deal more, which was better. 
For in really intimate communion, silence 
is the last, best gift, but it cannot be forced, 
it cannot be snatched at. You may try it, but 
you grow restless, you begin to consider your 
expression, you wonder how long it will last, 
you fancy it may seem to mean too much, and 
at last you are hurried over into talk again. 
But before a fire all things are possible, even 
silence. Chance acquaintances and intimate 
friends fall alike under its spell, talk is abso- 
lutely spontaneous, it flows rapidly or slowly, 
or dies away altogether. What need for talk 
when the fire is saying it all — now flaring up 
in a blaze to interpret our rarest enthusiasms, 
now popping and snapping with wit or fury. 



IN THE FIRELIGHT 229 

now burning with the even heat of steady, 
rational life, now settling into a contemplat- 
ive glow of meditation. 

In the circle of the hearth everything is 
good, but reminiscences are best of all. I 
sometimes think all life is valuable merely as 
an opportunity to accumulate reminiscences, 
and I am sure that the precious horde can be 
seen to best advantage by firelight. Then is 
the time for the miser to spread out his treas- 
ure and admire it. I remember once Jona- 
than and I were on a bicycle trip. My chain 
had broken and we had trudged eight long, 
hot, dusty miles to the river that had to be 
crossed that night. It was dark when we 
reached it, and it had begun to rain, a warm, 
dreary drizzle. As we stumbled over the rail- 
way track and felt our way past the little 
station toward the still smaller ferry-house, 
a voice from the darkness drawled, "Guess 
ye won't git the ferry to-night — last boat 
went half an hour ago." 

It was the final blow. We leaned forlornly 
on our wheels and looked out upon the dark 
water, whose rain-quenched mirror dully re- 
flected the lights of the opposite town. Finally 



230 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

I said, "Well, Jonathan, anyhow, we're mak- 
ing reminiscences." 

This remark was, I own, not highly practi- 
cal, but I intended it to be comforting, and if 
it failed — as it clearly did — to cheer Jona- 
than, that was not because it lacked wisdom, 
but because men are so often devoid of im- 
agination save as an adornment of their 
easy moments. 

Finally the same impersonal voice out of 
the dark uttered another sentence: "Might 
row ye 'cross if ye've got to go to-night." 

"How much?" said Jonathan. 

"Guess it's wuth a dollar. Mean night to 
be out there." 

We had, between us, forty-seven cents and 
three street-car tickets, good in the opposite 
town. All this we meekly offered him, and 
in the pause that followed I added desper- 
ately, "And we can each take an oar and 
help." 

"Wall — I '11 take ye." 

It seemed to me that the voice suggested 
an accompanying grin, but I had no proof. 

And so we got across. We never saw the 
face of our boatman, but on the other side we 



IN THE FIRELIGHT 231 

felt for his hand and emptied our pockets into 
it — nickels and dimes and pennies, and the 
three car tickets; but as we were turning to 
grope our way up the dock the voice said, 
**Here — ye '11 need two of them tickets to 
git home with. I do' want 'um." 

Now already it must be evident to any one 
that my remark to Jonathan, though perhaps 
ill-timed, embodied a profound and cheering 
truth. The more uncomfortable you are, the 
more desperate your situation, the better 
the reminiscences you are storing up to be 
enjoyed before the fire. 
I Yes, there is nothing like firelight for remin- 
iscences. By the clear light of morning — 
say ten o'clock — I might be forced to admit 
that life has had its humdrum and unpleasant 
aspects, but in the evening, with the candles 
lighted and the fire glowing and flickering, I 
will allow no such thing. The firelight some- 
how lights up all the lovely bits, and about 
the unlovely ones it throws a thick mantle of 
shadow, like the shadows in the corners of 
the room behind us. Nor does the firelight 
magic end here. Not only does it play about 
the fair hours of our past, making them fairer. 



232 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 

it also vaguely multiplies them, so that for one 
real occurrence we see many. It is like stand- 
ing between opposing mirrors: looking into 
either, one sees a receding series of reflections, 
unending as Banquo's royal line. 

Thus, once last winter Jonathan and I 
spent a long evening reading aloud a tale of 
the "Earthly Paradise." Once last summer we 
sat alone before the embers and quietly talked. 
Once and only once. Yet firelit memory 
is already laying her touch upon those hours. 
Already, though my diary tells me they stood 
alone, I am persuaded that they were many. 
I look back over a retrospect of many long 
winter evenings, in whose cozy light I see 
again the ringed smoke of Jonathan's pipe 
and hear again the lingering verse of the idle 
singer's tales; a retrospect of many long sum- 
mer twilights, wherein the warmth of the 
settling embers mingles with the sharp cool- 
ness of a summer night, and pleasant talk 
gives place to pleasant silence. 

The apple logs have burned through and 
rolled apart, the great backlog has settled 
deeper and deeper into the ashes. The fire 
whispers and murmurs, it whistles soft, low 



IN THE FIRELIGHT 233 

notes, it chuckles and sighs, finally it sinks 
into reverie, stirring now and then to whisper 
''sh-h-h-h" lest we break the spell. Only the 
old clock in the hall refuses to yield, and so- 
berly persists in its "tick-tock," 'Hick-tock." 
Jonathan's pipe is smoked out, but he does 
not fill it, and we sit there, looking deep into 
the rosy glow, and dreaming, dreaming — 



THE END 



APR 25 1912 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



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